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Bitcoin Magazine

The Hyperinflation of 1971 at the Kindergarten

I’m pretty sure it was 1971, but it could have been 1972. In any case, it was in kindergarten, and I was five years old. Our teachers had set up a system to motivate us kids to behave well. They had hung a big board on the wall, with all of our names listed. If you were particularly well-behaved, kind, helpful, or polite, they drew a black dot next to your name. Misbehave, and they gave you a red one. It was all about following the kindergarten rules, and the absolute transparency of it motivated most of us to try our best.

At some point, an extra prize was introduced for exceptionally good behavior: a small piece of fabric. From the group’s standpoint, that was worth much more than the top ranking in a row of black dots. And it was tangible. You could prove your elite status, even out in the sandbox.

Eventually, a trading system developed between us kids. For a scrap of fabric, you could get a bucket of sifted sand. For two, you could get a piece of candy. Suddenly, we could trade labor (sifting sand) for status symbols or sweets.

Then one day, a new teacher arrived. For whatever reason, she much more generously handed out those scraps of fabric. She simply changed the rules governing their distribution. All of a sudden, everyone had them, and you had to spend four for a piece of candy instead of two. Some of the kids started to complain. Their hard-earned scraps of fabric were now worth less, and they demanded more of them.

As you’d expect, the fabric scraps were given out more and more freely. Before long, anyone could take as many as they wanted. Eventually, they were lying around all over the place. They were worthless. No one wanted them anymore. You couldn’t trade them for anything. And so, at just five years old, I experienced genuine hyperinflation.

What does this have to do with Bitcoin?

In kindergarten, the rules were simply changed. The new teacher wanted to be nice, we kids whined, and suddenly more and more fabric scraps were handed out.

The rules of Bitcoin simply cannot be changed.

It’s a completely different story with our fiat currencies. They too have rules. The problem is that no one can ensure those rules are actually followed. Here is an example: the European Central Bank is not allowed to permanently finance governments through bond purchases, yet it does so anyway, brazenly and with no one doing—or even being able to do—anything about it. And who would intervene anyway?

Here’s another example. The Maastricht Treaty’s Stability and Growth Pact stipulated that the budget deficits of EU member states could not exceed 3% of their GDP, although permissible exceptions were built in. However, between 2000 and 2010, the Stability Criteria were repeatedly violated without sanctions—not only by Greece (11 times) but also by larger countries such as Italy (seven times), France (six times), and Germany (five times). According to the Maastricht Treaty, there are clear sanctions for countries that unlawfully fail to adhere to the deficit limit. But not once has such a sanction been imposed. No attempt was ever even made.

This may have been politically expedient and justified for whatever reason, but it shows how difficult it is for us to adhere to the rules. It’s like the New Year’s resolutions that we make with the greatest of convictions, but then usually don’t stick to for very long. The result is what matters. Currencies inflate and, sooner or later, become worthless. The U.S. dollar has lost 97% of its value over the last hundred years. The British pound, which originally represented a pound of silver, has suffered the same fate. All because more and more new dollars, euros, or pounds have been created, or to put it differently, printed.

The outcome is the same: when the fabric scraps become worthless, everyone who holds them loses their wealth.

This cannot happen with Bitcoin. Its rules are fixed, and no one controls the system nor can they simply change those rules.

Discover more in Bitcoin: The Honest Money!
This excerpt is just the beginning. Dive deeper into how inflation devalues your money, your savings, and your time in Bitcoin: The Honest Money by Alex von Frankenberg, Ph.D. The paperback is available now.

Order your copy here!

This post The Hyperinflation of 1971 at the Kindergarten first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Alex v. Frankenberg.

Bitcoin Magazine

5th Worst Bitcoin Price Action Ever — I’m Buying At 99.8% Probability

The bitcoin price looks bad, but I’m buying. Price might go lower, it always can, but there is value at these levels, and I’m accumulating. I think it’s important to be honest about how I’m actually acting on the analysis I publish, rather than just presenting data from a distance. And right now, the data is saying something that has only been said a handful of times in Bitcoin’s entire history.

Let’s cut to the chase:

• The Crosby Ratio Z-score has one of the lowest readings in history.
• The RSI is at a level we’ve only encountered a handful of times in extreme market lows.
• Bitcoin has bounced off the 200-week moving average.
• The SOPR is in the bottom fifth percentile of all historical readings.
• The Mayer Multiple is also in its bottom fifth percentile.

The Crosby Ratio

The Crosby Ratio Z-score measures bitcoin’s price momentum and standardizes it for Bitcoin’s evolving volatility. It’s not a fixed threshold as it adjusts as the market matures and volatility compresses, making it applicable across every stage of Bitcoin’s history. The current reading is around -1.7. This means 99.8% of all days in Bitcoin’s history have registered a less extreme reading on this indicator.

Figure 1: The Crosby Ratio Z-Score has just dipped to one of its lowest ever values.

The list of instances where this reading has been as low: the recent drop to $60,000, the first break below $20,000 in 2022, the COVID crash in March 2020, and the 2018 bear market low. That’s it. Four occasions in over a decade of price history. Every single one of them turned out to be a significant accumulation opportunity.

The RSI

The Relative Strength Index is one of the most widely used momentum indicators across all markets. Bitcoin’s weekly RSI is currently at one of the lowest levels ever. The previous instances of readings this low were the 2015 bear market low, the 2018 bear market low, the COVID crash, and the recent drop to $60,000.

Figure 2: The Relative Strength Index is comparable to historical lows.

Two independent momentum indicators, measured completely differently, but producing the same short list of historical comparisons. That kind of confluence across methodologies isn’t something to dismiss.

The 200-Week Moving Average

The 200-Week Moving Average has served as bear market support throughout Bitcoin’s history. The only meaningful exception was the FTX collapse in late 2022, which caused a brief but sharp undershoot before a rapid recovery. Outside of that event, this level has held as a floor every single cycle.

Figure 3: Bitcoin currently sits just above its 200WMA.

View Live Chart

Bitcoin has just bounced off that level again. Directly beneath current prices sits the recent cycle low, creating the structure for a potential double bottom, one of the more reliable technical formations across any market. The 200-week moving average and the Bitcoin Realized Price converge in approximately the same zone, adding further weight to this level as meaningful structural support.

SOPR & The Mayer Multiple

The Spent Output Profit Ratio is currently in the bottom fifth percentile of all historical readings. This means the rate of realized losses across the Bitcoin network, the pace at which holders are selling at a loss, is in the deepest 5% of anything we’ve ever recorded. The selling that has driven this move has been predominantly short-term in nature; value days destroyed data confirms that long-term holders have largely not participated in this liquidation. These are short-term traders and leveraged positions being cleared out, and not the conviction holders capitulating.

Figure 4: The Spent Output Profit Ratio illustrates the severity of recent losses.

View Live Chart

The Mayer Multiple, which measures bitcoin’s price relative to its 200-day moving average, is simultaneously in its own bottom fifth percentile. When these two indicators have historically been in their lower extremes at the same time, the resulting accumulation opportunities have been exceptional. It has happened only a handful of times, and each instance has been followed by significant price appreciation.

Figure 5: The Mayer Multiple has reached levels corresponding to previous bear cycle lows.

To Sum It Up

I’ll be honest, the strength of the decline surprised me. I anticipated a pullback from the $80,000 resistance zone, but the move through $70,000 was sharper than expected. What hasn’t surprised me is the data that’s emerged as a result, because this kind of confluence across technical, on-chain, and momentum indicators has appeared before, and the market has consistently rewarded accumulation at these readings.

Could we go lower? Yes. The realized price sits not far beneath current levels and represents the next meaningful support zone if the low is revisited. I’m prepared for that scenario. But removing all emotion and looking purely at what the data is saying, five independent signals simultaneously in generational territory, this is not the moment to wait on the sidelines for a marginally better price.

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

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

This post 5th Worst Bitcoin Price Action Ever — I’m Buying At 99.8% Probability first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Matt Crosby.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s Pullback Tests Institutional Adoption Narrative as Pompliano Stays Bullish

Bitcoin’s recent price decline is testing one of the asset’s most prominent bullish narratives: that institutional adoption will stabilize volatility and support long-term growth.

Despite the downturn, ProCap Financial CEO Anthony Pompliano thinks that the broader trajectory remains intact, framing the current weakness as a natural phase in Bitcoin’s maturation into a mainstream financial asset.

Speaking on CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” Pompliano said Bitcoin’s integration into traditional finance is accelerating, pointing to growing interest from major institutions such as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. 

According to Pompliano, this shift represents the realization of a long-anticipated transition from a niche, ideologically driven asset to a widely held portfolio allocation.

“Bitcoin is maturing into a traditional finance asset,” Pompliano said, adding that institutional demand signals “what mass adoption looks like.”

Bitcoin has come under pressure in recent weeks, with prices retreating amid broader risk-off sentiment and capital rotation into equities, particularly in high-growth sectors like artificial intelligence and newly listed public companies. 

The downturn has revived concerns that Bitcoin’s adoption cycle may be nearing saturation, limiting its ability to deliver the outsized returns seen in prior cycles.

Some argue that Bitcoin’s earlier growth was driven largely by rapid user adoption and speculative inflows — dynamics that may be harder to replicate now that the asset has reached a more mature phase. 

As the CNBC host noted, the “adoption story” may have already peaked.

At the same time, some market participants, including Strategy’s Michael Saylor, have suggested capital could be rotating out of crypto into other high-momentum opportunities, including upcoming IPOs and AI-linked investments.

Pompliano: Rotation from bitcoin is natural, not structural

Speaking with CNBC, Pompliano pushed back on the idea that capital outflows signal structural weakness. Instead, he characterized the movement as typical portfolio rebalancing behavior.

“Capital chases momentum and returns,” he said, noting that Bitcoin’s liquidity makes it a convenient source of funds when investors pursue new opportunities.

The current market environment highlights a tension in Bitcoin’s evolution. While institutional adoption has broadened its investor base, it has also tied Bitcoin more closely to macroeconomic trends and cross-asset flows.

As a result, Bitcoin increasingly behaves like a risk asset during periods of market stress, declining alongside equities rather than acting as an uncorrelated hedge. This dynamic has complicated the narrative of Bitcoin as “digital gold,” particularly in the short term.

Still, Pompliano maintains that Bitcoin’s core fundamentals remain unchanged. He pointed to the network’s continued operation, decentralization, and predictable issuance schedule as evidence that the asset’s long-term value proposition is intact.

“Show me what has changed,” he said. “The network continues to do everything it is designed to do.”

Bitcoin as a ‘Savings Technology’

Pompliano reiterated his long-held view of Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat currency debasement, arguing that persistent government spending and monetary expansion underpin its long-term case.

He described Bitcoin as a “savings technology,” highlighting its historical compound annual growth rates — approximately 60% over the past decade and over 30% in the last three years — as evidence of its ability to preserve and grow capital over time.

In his view, Bitcoin’s role is less about short-term speculation and more about long-term wealth protection, akin to gold or real estate for previous generations.

This post Bitcoin’s Pullback Tests Institutional Adoption Narrative as Pompliano Stays Bullish first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Plunges Below ‘Fire Sale’ Territory as Fear Index Reads 12 — Echoing the FTX Crash

Bitcoin price dropped to levels on Thursday that placed it below the “Fire Sale!” band on the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart — a depth not reached since the catastrophic FTX exchange collapse in November 2022 — as the Fear and Greed Index registered a reading of 12 out of 100, deep in “Extreme Fear” territory.

Bitcoin price opened today near $63,500 after sliding below $62,000 last night. That puts BTC below even the most discounted valuation band on the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart — a level the model historically flags as a rare and extreme buying signal.

The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart is somewhat of a logarithmic growth curve overlaid with color-coded sentiment bands. The deepest band — labeled “Basically a Fire Sale!” — represents the lowest tier of the model’s projected fair value range. When Bitcoin trades beneath it, the asset sits outside the historical channel that has contained BTC’s long-term price behavior.

The last confirmed breach of the “Fire Sale!” floor occurred during the FTX exchange collapse in November 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire imploded and BTC cratered under forced selling pressure across the market. That event remains one of the most severe liquidity crises in crypto history.

Per Bitcoin Magazine Pro data from March 2026, Bitcoin price had already begun testing below the “Fire Sale!” zone — described at the time as “its first drop into this area since the FTX-induced crash”. 

The renewed descent on June 4 deepens that breach, with the coin shedding ground for the second consecutive week.

Bitcoin price and market in ‘Extreme Fear’

The Fear and Greed Index, which runs on a scale of 0 to 100, registered 12 on Thursday — placing the market squarely in “Extreme Fear”. The index aggregates volatility, market momentum, social sentiment, and derivatives data into a single score. 

A reading below 25 signals extreme fear, a condition that, by the index’s own framework, has historically preceded price recovery periods.

February 2026 saw the index touch an all-time low of 5, driven by a 52% drawdown from Bitcoin price’s peak of $126,000. Thursday’s reading of 12 sits just above that nadir, as Bitcoin price continues its slide from cycle highs.

On X today, Strategy’s Michael Saylor argued the sell-off reflects institutional capital rotating into AI infrastructure rather than a deterioration in Bitcoin’s fundamentals. The decline may have been compounded by concerns over Strategy selling 32 BTC to fund preferred-share dividends — its first bitcoin sale since 2022 — despite the company recently reducing debt by repurchasing $1.5 billion of convertible notes at a discount.

This post Bitcoin Price Plunges Below ‘Fire Sale’ Territory as Fear Index Reads 12 — Echoing the FTX Crash first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Schwab Strategist: Bitcoin’s $60,000 Mining Cost Could Mark the Cycle Bottom

Bitcoin is in a bear market. That much is not in dispute. 

What Jim Ferraioli, Director of Digital Currencies Research and Strategy at Charles Schwab, argued Wednesday on Bloomberg is more precise and more structural: this selloff has a measurable cost floor, and that floor is built not from sentiment or chart patterns, but from the physics of energy consumption.

The numbers frame the drawdown in context. Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in the fall before collapsing to roughly $60,000 in February — a 50% correction that, while brutal for recent buyers, falls far short of the 75%-plus implosions that defined prior Bitcoin bear markets.

Ferraioli’s core analytical framework centers on one question: what does it cost to manufacture Bitcoin? The answer creates a natural gravitational floor that has held across multiple cycles. 

For the most efficient miners — those operating at scale with next-generation ASIC hardware and access to the cheapest wholesale energy — the cost to produce one Bitcoin sits at approximately $60,000, Ferraioli said.

That figure is not arbitrary. It represents the all-in expense of powering a facility at roughly $0.07 per kilowatt-hour with the most advanced semiconductor fleets available.

The less efficient miners — those with older ASIC hardware, higher energy costs, and thinner operational margins — carry a production cost of approximately $95,000 per BTC, according to Glassnode data cited in Schwab’s May 2026 research report. That gap between $60,000 and $95,000 defines Bitcoin’s current valuation range. 

Bitcoin’s energy floor: Why $60,000 may mark the bottom

Ferraioli argues that in deep bear markets, the cost of production for the best miners has historically served as the bottom. February’s low near $60,000 aligns almost precisely with that level, as well as BTC’s 200-week moving average.

The BTC selling pressure is not random. It is demographically specific. The investors driving forced liquidations are those who acquired Bitcoin during the past 18 months — buyers who rode the asset from sub-$80,000 up to $126,000 and then watched gains evaporate in full. 

Schwab tracks two cost-basis metrics to quantify this pressure: the average acquisition cost for U.S. spot ETF and ETP holders, which stands near $83,000, and the active investor cost basis — excluding coins rewarded to miners — which sits near $78,000. 

Both figures sit well above current spot prices, putting the majority of recent entrants into unrealized loss positions and reinforcing $83,000 as a ceiling of overhead supply rather than a floor of support.

Glassnode’s on-chain data corroborates this dynamic. Bitcoin’s latest attempted rally stalled at the aggregate ETF cost basis near $83,000, with total realized losses spiking to $1.35 billion per day and long-term holders capitulating from cycle-top positions. Hedge funds represent roughly 30% of spot ETP ownership but are operating market-neutral, executing basis trades rather than taking directional views — meaning they provide no natural bid when prices fall.

Here is where Ferraioli’s analysis turns constructive. Every major publicly traded Bitcoin miner has announced a pivot toward high-performance computing (HPC) for AI inference workloads. The economics on their face appear to favor abandoning mining: inference generates higher net revenue per megawatt-hour than Bitcoin mining during peak demand windows. 

But demand for AI inference is not uniform across 24 hours. Models run hard during business hours and sit idle overnight and on weekends.

That creates a structural opportunity that does not displace BTC mining — it layers on top of it. Schwab’s analysis models Bitcoin as the optimal baseload monetization of power during off-peak hours, with inference overlaid during peak business-hour demand. 

A data center operating this hybrid model maximizes utilization across the full 24-hour cycle rather than leaving capacity dark when inference demand falls away. For miners, this translates to more stable revenue, reduced forced BTC sales to cover operating costs, and lower structural risk across bear market cycles.

Bitcoin is backed by energy 

The underlying thesis is one of energy economics. Bitcoin has no earnings, no free cash flow, and no CEO issuing guidance. Its value, in Ferraioli’s framework, derives from the energy cost required to produce it — a cost that is transparent, verifiable, and historically durable. 

In commodity markets, price cannot sustainably trade below cost of production. Producers shut down, supply contracts, and equilibrium resets higher. 

Bitcoin follows this same logic: when spot prices fall toward $60,000, the least efficient miners shut down operations, the network’s hash rate adjusts through Bitcoin’s difficulty mechanism, and the cost to produce each new coin falls.

As of May 2026, the average mining cost across all Bitcoin miners sits near $85,604, with the Bitcoin price trading in the mid-$60,000s — meaning the network as a whole is operating at a loss, a configuration that has historically preceded recoveries, not further collapse.

This post Schwab Strategist: Bitcoin’s $60,000 Mining Cost Could Mark the Cycle Bottom first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Hyperliquid’s rapid growth has drawn a warning from Britain’s financial regulator, adding a consumer-protection concern to a platform increasingly watched by Wall Street and traditional market operators.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) placed Hyperliquid and the Hyper Foundation on its warning list, saying the firm may be providing or promoting financial services in the UK without authorization.

In a May 21 notice, the financial regulator stated:

 “You should avoid dealing with this firm and beware of scams.”

The regulator listed the Hyper Foundation website, the Hyperliquid trading app, and the project’s social media channels under its unauthorized firm details.

It also warned that users would not have access to the Financial Ombudsman Service if they wanted to complain and would not be covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme if they lost money.

The notice comes as Hyperliquid expands beyond crypto-native trading into markets that increasingly overlap with traditional finance.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized, non-custodial derivatives exchange that allows users to trade perpetual futures, contracts that offer leveraged exposure without expiration dates.

Over the past year, the platform has become a major part of offshore crypto trading because it allows traders to keep positions open indefinitely while speculating on price movements.

In the UK, crypto derivatives have faced tighter limits since the FCA banned their sale to retail consumers in 2021. The country also expanded financial promotion rules to crypto assets in 2023, requiring firms marketing to UK users to meet stricter standards.

Considering this, Kyle Samani, chairman of Solana treasury company Forward Industries, described the FCA action as the “first of many,” signaling that some investors expect Hyperliquid’s growth to attract more regulatory attention as the platform moves closer to markets watched by traditional finance.

Traditional exchanges bring the fight to Washington

The UK warning came as Hyperliquid was already facing scrutiny from some of the largest operators in US derivatives markets.

Last month, executives from CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange raised concerns with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over Hyperliquid’s expanding perpetual futures marketplace.

They warned that the platform could pose risks to traditional commodities markets, particularly oil. Their concerns center on whether a decentralized trading venue with limited identity checks could allow traders to manipulate prices, coordinate around market-sensitive information, or evade sanctions.

Furthermore, CME and ICE warned that activity on Hyperliquid could affect global oil benchmarks if state-backed entities or sanctioned actors used the platform to gain exposure outside traditional oversight.

This pushback shows how Hyperliquid’s growth has widened the debate over decentralized finance.

For years, most DeFi platforms competed mainly for crypto liquidity. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 markets have moved that model closer to traditional finance by allowing synthetic exposure to stocks, commodities, and private companies.

Notably, Hyperliquid said real-world asset open interest on the platform reached a record $3 billion, with HIP-3 setting a new open-interest record each month since its launch in October 2025.

The platform runs continuously, giving traders access to leveraged markets at any hour, including when traditional exchanges are closed.

That structure has helped attract traders seeking to react immediately to earnings, geopolitical developments, policy announcements, and macroeconomic data that can move oil, equities, and private-market sentiment outside standard trading hours.

For CME and ICE, the same structure raises market-integrity concerns. Both exchanges operate under regulatory frameworks that include approved contracts, clearing requirements, surveillance systems, margin rules, and customer-protection standards.

Hyperliquid offers a different model built around public blockchain records, open access, and fewer conventional gatekeepers.

The dispute also carries a commercial edge. If liquidity in commodities, stock indexes, and other traditional assets shifts toward on-chain venues, incumbent exchanges could face pressure from platforms offering lower costs, faster product launches, and round-the-clock trading.

CFTC opens a regulated path for perpetual futures

Despite these concerns from the traditional financial giants, the US regulatory backdrop has been shifting as officials begin creating approved channels for perpetual futures, the product category at the center of Hyperliquid’s growth.

Last month, the CFTC approved Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual futures contract for listing on a registered derivatives venue.

The agency also issued policy guidance on perpetual derivatives and 24-hour trading, while staff provided interpretive guidance and no-action relief tied to Coinbase’s access to certain Deribit perpetual products through an affiliate.

The actions show that US regulators are willing to bring perpetual futures into regulated markets when they are offered through approved venues and subject to existing oversight.

That shift is important for Hyperliquid because perpetual futures remain central to its exchange activity and to the wider offshore crypto derivatives market.

It also changes the competitive landscape. Regulated firms such as Kalshi and Coinbase now have clearer routes to serve US customers through recognized market infrastructure.

Hyperliquid remains outside that framework and blocks US residents from direct access.

Still, the Hyperliquid Policy Center welcomed the CFTC’s actions, saying they marked a long-overdue acknowledgment that perpetual derivatives can support price discovery and risk management.

The group said years of regulatory uncertainty had pushed the market offshore and weakened US competitiveness in global derivatives.

The organization also pushed back against claims that Hyperliquid’s structure makes misconduct easier. It said the platform publishes a complete on-chain record of every transaction in real time, creating a transparent environment for surveillance, detection, and investigation by regulators and law enforcement.

“Hyperliquid offers enhanced market transparency,” the group said, adding that continuous trading improves price discovery because markets move whether legacy exchanges are open or closed.

The response reflects the main argument from Hyperliquid’s supporters: onchain markets can offer a more open and efficient structure, with public records replacing parts of the reporting and surveillance systems used by traditional exchanges.

Former Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren has pointed to a broader move toward lower-cost, 24-hour trading of financial assets.

He said liquidity is moving toward decentralized exchanges and away from more expensive centralized venues, echoing Hyperliquid’s appeal to professional traders seeking speed, access, and lower friction.

According to him:

“Hyperliquid has an active market for many commodities, stocks, pre-ipo stocks, as well as crypto. The gold, silver, and oil markets have been active on weekends given the administration's tendency to make announcements over the weekend. 24-7 exchanges means 24-7 trading.”

Hyperliquid faces difficult paths from here

Market observers noted that the regulatory pressure leaves Hyperliquid with a harder question of how much of its current model can survive if the platform wants deeper access to regulated markets.

Derek Edwards, managing partner of venture capital firm Collab Currency, said Hyperliquid is a “killer product,” but faces several constraints if it wants to reach US users and institutions more directly.

He outlined five possible paths for the firm, which include remaining offshore, building a regulated US wrapper, decentralizing further under market-structure legislation, centralizing into a more conventional corporate exchange, or lobbying for a bespoke regulatory framework.

However, none of these paths offers an easy route.

According to Edwards, remaining offshore would allow Hyperliquid to preserve its current product and continue serving global crypto traders. It would also leave US institutional demand to regulated firms that can offer perpetual futures through approved venues.

Meanwhile, a regulated US wrapper could give Hyperliquid a way into the world’s largest capital market, but that structure would likely require separate customer funds, narrower product listings, and a compliance framework distinct from the global platform.

However, US futures rules would make it difficult to mix domestic customer collateral with offshore protocol margin, while approved products would probably focus on deeper, more liquid contracts rather than Hyperliquid’s broader range of markets.

Edwards noted that this approach could also complicate HYPE’s economics. If revenue from a regulated corporate venue flowed into token buybacks, burns, or assistance-fund mechanics, regulators could examine whether token holders were participating in the profits of an operating business.

That would bring additional securities-law questions around the token.

Meanwhile, a deeper decentralization push could help Hyperliquid address some token-classification issues under proposed market-structure legislation such as the CLARITY Act.

That path would likely require broader validator participation, more decentralized listings, reduced emergency discretion, and slower governance-led upgrades.

Those changes would carry a strategic cost. Much of Hyperliquid’s growth has come from fast product decisions, tight execution, and the ability to launch markets quickly. More decentralized governance could strengthen the regulatory argument while reducing the speed at which the platform gains market share.

However, a more centralized structure would give regulators a clearer corporate counterparty, but it could weaken the network thesis around HYPE as a token tied to protocol activity.

Lastly, lobbying for a tailored framework may offer another route as the CFTC becomes more open to perpetual futures and 24-hour trading, though that process could take time and still leave unresolved questions around token classification and derivatives rules.

The post Hyperliquid’s UK warning reveals the regulatory test behind its Wall Street push appeared first on CryptoSlate.

For the better part of two years, Wall Street has treated AI as the most bullish trade on the board, a growth engine that turbocharges earnings, underwrites stretched valuations, and promises a productivity windfall somewhere down the road.

However, the Fed has access to the same numbers and seems to be more inclined to treat the AI build-out as a fresh source of demand in a market that's still fighting to drag inflation back toward its 2% target.

Goldman Sachs now expects AI-related capital spending to approach $800 billion in 2026, and it calculates that the surge will lift its full-year business investment forecast to 7.8% while adding roughly 3.3 percentage points to capital-expenditure growth on its own.

TrendForce, tracking the nine largest cloud providers in the world, places their combined 2026 outlay near $830 billion, a jump of about 79% over the previous year. A pretty big slice of that increase reflects rising prices rather than added capacity, with Microsoft attributing some $25 billion of its $190 billion budget to costlier memory and components.

All of it puts quite a bit of weight on the inputs the Fed tends to watch most closely, which could turn this investment boom into a policy headache.

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Jun 5, 2026 · Gino Matos

Where does the $800 billion in AI spending actually go?

It helps to imagine this spending in physical terms. All of that money takes the shape of land, steel, transformers, copper wiring, gigawatts of fresh generation capacity, industrial-scale cooling, and the incredibly skilled and incredibly rare trades hired to assemble all of it.

Goldman described this as a wave that reaches across servers, semiconductors, memory, power infrastructure, data centers, software, and research budgets, and the bank's longer-range model traces annual AI capex climbing from around $765 billion this year toward $1.6 trillion by 2031.

Power has become the binding constraint. In a late-May speech, Fed Governor Lisa Cook noted that electricity and water prices have each climbed about 5% over the past year, that chips, high-tech equipment, and software have all grown more expensive, and that wages in specialty construction trades have picked up notably. Households feel some of that pressure on their monthly bills, which began drawing political pushback as several state legislatures move to slow large data-center development.

The central bank's leadership has been unusually clear and honest about where this leads. Speaking back in March, Jerome Powell told reporters that the construction frenzy was “putting pressure on all kinds of goods and services that go into building these things,” and he conceded that the effect was “probably pushing inflation up.”

Cook went further in that same May address, warning that “yet another shock to prices could be layered on from the heightened investment demand due to AI” and pointing out that companies have announced more than $1.5 trillion in data-center plans, only a sliver of which has actually been built.

The demand side of AI, in other words, is showing up in the price data well ahead of any productivity payoff the technology eventually delivers.

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Bitcoin’s $63k slide shows ETF demand fighting AI equities for dollar liquidity

Bitcoin’s break from the S&P 500 now hinges on ETF flows, AI equity demand, and whether the $66,900-$70,000 shelf can be reclaimed.

Jun 4, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

What it means for Bitcoin's rate-cut bet

The consequences travel from Silicon Valley balance sheets straight into crypto. Bitcoin spent most of the year leaning on the expectation that cooling inflation would free the Fed to cut rates, loosen financial conditions, and rekindle the risk appetite that powered the 2024 rally.

CryptoSlate has documented how tightly the asset now tracks liquidity cycles, a sensitivity that has overtaken Bitcoin halving as the dominant price driver. An $800 billion demand makes rate cuts unlikely, since every dollar of AI-related price pressure hands the Fed one more reason to stay put.

Markets have already begun repricing that. Futures and prediction markets now put the odds of a hold at the June 16-17 meeting above 93%, which will be the first one chaired by Kevin Warsh following his May handover from Powell. CryptoSlate has tracked the reversal as it unfolded, from a stretch when bond traders were pricing a year-end hike to the inflation prints that kept the Fed frozen.

The repricing has bled into spot prices, with Bitcoin sliding to around $63,600 by June 4 after briefly breaking below $62,000, roughly half its October 2025 record and down more than 13% over the week. Much of that damage comes from exits, since Bitcoin ETFs saw a record 11-session outflow streak worth about $3.45 billion, the longest run of redemptions since the funds launched in 2024. A large share of that capital rotated straight into the AI and semiconductor equities that were driving the macro problem in the first place.

Over a five-year horizon, AI may well do what its champions promise, lowering costs, automating routine labor, and easing inflation through real gains in output per worker. However, the build-out phase tends to work the other way around first. Pulling years of infrastructure demand into a narrow window bids up hardware, energy, and talent long before we see any real efficiency, so the price shock arrives early and the windfall arrives late.

That gap between immediate consequences and delayed benefits is what's been troubling the Fed. Warsh has argued that AI will prove “structurally disinflationary” and usher in “the most productivity-enhancing wave of our lifetimes,” a view that confirms his openness to lower rates. But Cook and Governor Michael Barr lean the other way, with Barr saying flatly that he doesn't believe the AI boom will be a reason for lowering policy rates.

Traders, on the other hand, have been mostly troubled by timing. Bitcoin, alongside equities and the rest of the market, tends to respond to the first decision in front of them. So, a “productivity thesis” that will probably pay off in 2030 does little to positions held this week, month, or even quarter. Inflation running above 3% leaves Warsh little room to act on his convictions in June, regardless of where he'd like to steer.

The same AI boom inflating tech valuations and carrying the indices higher may be the very force keeping the Fed cautious, delaying the liquidity cycle that crypto traders have spent eighteen months waiting for. If policymakers settle on seeing $800 billion in annual spending as one more pillar of sticky demand, Bitcoin's rate-cut trade rests on a foundation considerably thinner than its holders would care to admit.

The post AI’s $800 billion spending boom is becoming Bitcoin’s Fed problem appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double the 80,000 that Wall Street economists had expected, and the unemployment rate held at 4.3%.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also revised March and April higher by a combined 93,000 positions, which left the spring looking much stronger than anyone believed a month ago. For the people who landed those jobs, this counts as good news, and the headline number is certainly something a sitting administration enjoys waving around.

The trouble starts when you ask what a labor market this strong does to the price of borrowing. A report this firm gives the Federal Reserve very little reason to cut interest rates, just as traders, homebuyers, and crypto investors have spent months waiting for that. The market answered fast, with Bitcoin sliding toward $60,000 by Friday in a drop CryptoSlate tracked in real time.

Related Reading

Bitcoin price craters to $60,000 as BTC bulls get jobs report they were hoping to avoid

The May payrolls beat was hawkish enough to pressure crypto, while government hiring and cooler yearly wage growth keep the second interpretation from being one-way.

Jun 5, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

But how does a single jobs report reach into mortgage costs, credit-card bills, and the Bitcoin selloff?

A strong labor market and the Fed's shrinking room to cut

Nonfarm payrolls come from the BLS establishment survey, a monthly count of the paid jobs sitting on employer books across most of the economy, from restaurants and hospitals to factories, schools, banks, and government offices. That number carries so much weight because it's the best monthly read on whether companies are still hiring or starting to pull back, and that signal affects how the Fed thinks about interest rates.

Farm jobs are left out of the count because the survey is built around the regular employer-payroll economy, and farm work tends to be seasonal, irregular, and full of self-employment and family labor that runs outside standard payroll systems, which would make the monthly numbers jumpy and harder to compare over time. Most of the May gains came from hiring in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care, so the strength was real despite being concentrated in a handful of corners.

The April revisions carried as much weight as the numbers for May. The first estimate for any month is preliminary, built from whatever employer responses arrive by the deadline, and the government updates it as more data comes in. This time the updates ran in the economy's favor, with April lifted by 64,000 to 179,000 and March raised by 29,000 to 214,000, which made the spring look like a sturdier stretch of hiring than the first estimates had shown.

The Fed has spent 2026 wrestling with an inflation problem that's grown worse through the spring. The war with Iran drove oil prices sharply higher, and April CPI came in at 3.8% year over year, the highest reading since May 2023, with energy responsible for most of the jump. A central bank watching prices run that hot wants clear proof the economy is cooling before it eases, and a labor market adding 172,000 jobs gives it the opposite.

The result is that rates stay higher for longer, and that pressure is building during a leadership change at the Fed that CryptoSlate reported as the year's biggest macro test for Bitcoin. Fed Governor Christopher Waller recently dismissed rate-cut talk as “crazy,” and bond traders had already shifted toward betting on a possible hike by year-end, a turn CryptoSlate described as the rate-cut trade flipping into a hike-risk problem.

That affects everyday costs for households. When the Fed holds its rate high, mortgage rates stay elevated, refinancing stays expensive, credit-card balances keep piling up interest, and car loans hold their bite. The wage growth we've seen over the quarter offers some cushion, though April's inflation was hot enough that real wages slipped over the month, so paychecks bought a little less even while employers kept adding staff. The strong report stretches out the window in which borrowing stays expensive for ordinary people, and it's doing it heading straight into the Fed's June 16-17 meeting, where policymakers now have one more reason to wait.

Why does the pressure from jobs land hardest on Bitcoin?

The pressure squeezing homebuyers is quick to reach crypto traders, because Bitcoin has spent the past 18 months trading as one of the assets most sensitive to liquidity. For all the talk about it, liquidity is just how freely money and credit move through the financial system. So, when investors expect lower rates and easier conditions, that money tends to flow toward riskier bets, with Bitcoin among them.

Bitcoin was down roughly 17% on the week, and more than 50% below its October all-time high near $126,200, after a record run of ETF outflows and a rotation of big-money investors into AI stocks pulled away the steady buying that had been holding the market up. CryptoSlate has shown how Bitcoin's price now follows Treasury supply, real yields, and Fed liquidity far more closely than anything happening inside crypto itself.

Fabian Dori, chief investment officer at Sygnum Bank, said the May report was the most awkward possible outcome for anyone counting on relief.

“Today's strong print is the least comfortable outcome for anyone hoping for rate relief,” Dori said. “With April CPI already at 3.8%, resilient payrolls take a June cut off the table and harden the case that the Fed stays put through the summer.”

His advice to investors was to read the reaction rather than the number itself.

“Watch the repricing rather than the headline,” he said. “For digital assets, that delays the rate-driven liquidity tailwind people are hoping for.”

Dori added that a few liquidity factors could still help at the margin, including possible eSLR reform and the level of cash the Treasury keeps parked at the Fed, though he expects a hot jobs number to set the tone for markets in the near term.

He also believes that Bitcoin responds to the broader cost of money as much as to anything happening inside crypto, and a strong labor market keeps that cost high for longer. The deeper risk CryptoSlate has flagged all year is a stagflation setup of sticky prices alongside a Fed that won't cut, the kind of backdrop that keeps money scarce even while the selloff has left Bitcoin beaten down enough for a sharp bounce.

That leaves the market roughly where it began the spring, waiting on a central bank that keeps getting fresh reasons to wait.

The question underneath every jobs report has always been whether the economy is slowing enough to earn relief or staying strong enough to keep rates high, and for now, May's answer isn't the good one. The economy is still standing, hiring is still happening, and that strength is what's keeping cheaper money, lower mortgage costs, and a Bitcoin recovery further down the road than the people waiting on them would like.

The post May jobs report explained: Why 172,000 jobs means higher rates, pricier loans, and a Bitcoin drop appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Crypto exchanges are seeing the weakest retail-driven activity in years, but some of the biggest platforms are finding a lucrative new source of volume in Wall Street-style bets on gold, silver, oil, stocks, and indexes.

According to a CryptoQuant report shared with CryptoSlate, the shift is emerging during one of the weakest trading periods for centralized crypto platforms in more than two years.

Spot trading volume fell to $679 billion in April, the lowest monthly level since October 2023, as lower prices and fading retail participation reduced market activity.

At the same time, some exchanges are seeing growth in products that look less like crypto speculation and more like traditional macro trading.

As a result, perpetual futures tied to metals, energy, and equities have become one of the fastest-growing segments on several major crypto venues. This shows how platforms built for Bitcoin and Ethereum are expanding into Wall Street-style markets that trade around the clock.

Retail volume falls to multi-year lows

The collapse in spot market turnover illustrates the sheer magnitude of the post-2025 market contraction.

According to the CryptoQuant report, centralized exchange spot volume in April plummeted 46% year-over-year, and sits a staggering 67% below the market top recorded in October 2025.

That contraction has hit the industry’s core business model, which depends on frequent trading, market volatility, and steady participation from retail users.

Still, Binance remained the largest spot venue by cumulative trading volume in 2026, with $1.3 trillion. Bybit followed with $285 billion, while Gate recorded $253 billion and Crypto.com processed $247 billion.

While these top-tier platforms still capture the lion's share of available trading flow, the underlying data indicate a far less casual ecosystem of participants.

Historically, retail traders are the first demographic to retreat during protracted crypto downturns. Casual investors often exit the market entirely after incurring losses or drastically reduce their positions when prevailing momentum stalls.

Conversely, professional trading desks, automated market makers, and institutional arbitrageurs maintain their presence, as their strategies rely on hedging, executing relative-value trades, and providing market liquidity rather than chasing directional price movements.

This demographic transition has squarely placed the weakness in the derivatives sector, a domain previously dominated by aggressive retail speculation.

Perpetual futures volume has cascaded 53% from its October 2025 highs, closely mirroring the spot market contraction. Binance retains its dominant market share in the perpetual futures space, followed by MEXC, OKX, Bybit, and Gate.

The parallel decline in both spot and leveraged trading indicates that users are not merely rotating among product types; overall demand for digital asset exposure has fundamentally weakened.

Larger trades point to a different customer base

Despite the pronounced drop in absolute trading volume, a granular look at average transaction sizes reveals a market that is steadily institutionalizing.

Average trade size is an imperfect signal, as large transactions can come from institutions, market makers, high-net-worth traders, or professional accounts. Smaller retail orders tend to pull the average down. Still, the metric helps show where bigger participants are most active.

In 2026, Gate logged the highest average Bitcoin spot trade size among major centralized venues, registering approximately $4,000 per transaction. This figure remains elevated even after cooling from a peak of $6,200 during a wave of institutional onboarding in 2025.

CryptoQuant pointed out that several crypto trading platforms, including Kraken, MEXC, and OKX, similarly ranked at the top of the industry for average Bitcoin spot trade sizes.

Kraken’s presence aligns with its long-standing reputation as a compliance-focused hub for professional entities, while OKX and MEXC have cultivated substantial global bases capable of executing bulk orders.

Meanwhile, this institutional footprint is even more pronounced in derivatives trading.

According to CryptoQuant, Gate led the market in average Bitcoin perpetual futures trade size in 2026 at roughly $8,900.

At the height of the 2025 market cycle, this metric briefly reached an astonishing $24,700 in August before normalizing. Kraken and OKX also maintain leading positions in derivatives trade sizes.

This trend suggests Gate has become a more important execution venue for larger Bitcoin trades in both spot and derivatives markets.

Kraken and OKX also remained among the leading venues by average Bitcoin futures trade size, reinforcing the divide between platforms that attract larger execution and those that rely more heavily on broad retail flow.

Notably, this consistency extends to Ethereum markets where Kraken, Gate, MEXC, and OKX continue to dominate average Ethereum spot trade sizes. Gate has also firmly established its presence in this top tier following sustained growth that began in early 2024.

This uniform pattern across multiple assets and product lines indicates that the shift toward wholesale, large-scale execution is a structural market evolution rather than an isolated anomaly.

Liquidity concentrates around fewer venues

This professional consolidation is heavily dependent on the underlying market structure, specifically order-book depth. Institutional participants require deep liquidity to enter and exit substantial positions without triggering severe price slippage or widening bid-ask spreads.

In Bitcoin spot markets, Gate and Binance have maintained among the deepest 1% order books among major exchanges, averaging roughly 200,000 to 250,000 BTC in depth over the period tracked.

The perpetual futures market, while inherently more competitive, displays a similar concentration of liquidity. Gate regularly leads the pack, offering Bitcoin perpetual depth ranging from 750,000 to 1.3 million BTC daily.

Hyperliquid, the leading DEX platform, has surprisingly emerged as a formidable decentralized competitor, maintaining depth above 600,000 BTC.

Meanwhile, traditional heavyweights like Binance and OKX remain robust, generally fluctuating between 500,000 and 850,000 BTC in depth.

These figures show why liquidity has become a central battleground where exchanges with deep books can attract larger traders. In turn, these larger traders can bring greater liquidity, reinforcing the venue’s position as a preferred execution hub.

In a market where retail volume is falling, that feedback loop becomes more important. Platforms with thinner books may struggle to compete for professional activity, while larger venues can use liquidity to expand into new products beyond crypto.

Crypto exchanges push into macro trading

Having secured deep liquidity and professional clientele, the most dominant crypto platforms are now leveraging their infrastructure to encroach on traditional finance.

CryptoQuant noted that trading volume for traditional-finance perpetual futures on crypto exchanges surged in 2026, reaching about $450 billion per month in March. Metals-linked contracts drove most of the activity, with gold and silver accounting for more than 90% of volume during the peak month.

The timing tracks a broader macro backdrop, with gold and silver rallying as investors reacted to inflation concerns.

At the same time, equities reached new highs amid optimism about artificial intelligence, while oil markets became more volatile amid geopolitical tensions involving the United States and Iran.

Crypto exchanges capitalized on this macro turbulence to offer traders a familiar structure in a different venue: perpetual futures that trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Perpetual futures are common in crypto because they allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions without an expiration date.

Extending that structure to gold, silver, oil, and stock-linked products gives crypto-native platforms a way to compete for macro trading activity that has traditionally been concentrated within brokerages, futures exchanges, and contracts-for-difference platforms.

CryptoQuant stated that the early demand has been strongest in metals. Gold and silver became the primary gateway for traders on crypto exchanges to express views on traditional markets.

More recently, oil-linked products have grown as energy volatility increased. Meanwhile, equity-linked contracts remain smaller, but they indicate that exchanges are testing a wider range of traditional assets.

Gate and Binance dominate the new segment

Still, CryptoQuant noted that the booming market for traditional-finance futures is largely dominated by a few exchanges.

For context, Gate handled nearly $290 billion in TradFi futures volume in March, far ahead of other platforms. This jump was mostly driven by gold and silver trading.

Binance ranked second, hitting $109 billion in March and maintaining high activity through May at $64 billion. MEXC, Bitget, and Bybit also saw increases as traders looked beyond metals into other asset classes.

Looking at the year as a whole, the market is highly concentrated. So far in 2026, Gate leads with about $368 billion in TradFi futures volume. Binance follows with $298 billion. Together, these two exchanges account for about two-thirds of the entire market.

MEXC is next with $179 billion, followed by Bitget with $65 billion. Bybit, despite being a major player in crypto derivatives, has handled a smaller $24 billion in traditional futures.

These numbers show how crypto exchanges are trying to adapt to the current market situation. Their original business relied on volatile digital tokens and everyday people making speculative bets.

Now, the focus is shifting to professional traders, deep market liquidity, and giving users access to traditional assets around the clock.

The post Crypto exchanges are losing retail traders but are filling the gap with Wall Street-style bets appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A group of Republican senators is warning US bank regulators that a little-known capital rule could effectively keep banks out of Bitcoin, even as Congress moves to give traditional financial firms a larger role in digital asset markets.

In a May 27 letter to Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, FDIC Chair Travis Hill, and Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould, six senators urged the agencies to build a new capital framework for on-balance-sheet digital asset activities.

Their target is Basel's 1,250% risk weight for assets such as Bitcoin, which they argue functions as a de facto ban on banks holding crypto.

A 1,250% risk weight multiplied by the 8% minimum capital requirement equals a 100% capital allocation, meaning a bank holding $100 million in Bitcoin needs at least $100 million in capital against it.

For banks that manage to meet internal CET1 targets above the regulatory floor, the burden climbs further. A bank with a 12% internal capital target would need $150 million in capital for that same $100 million exposure, requiring roughly $18 million in annual net profit to clear a 12% ROE hurdle.

Normal custody, trading, or client-service economics rarely generate returns at that threshold, leaving a bank legally authorized to hold Bitcoin but financially unable to justify doing so.

Why this lands now

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act on May 14 by a 15-9 vote, sending it to the Senate floor.

If passed, the bill would give banks a clearer statutory role in digital asset markets, but the senators argue that legislative permission without capital efficiency leaves banks holding a permission slip they cannot afford to use. A bank can be legally authorized to hold Bitcoin and still be structurally prevented from doing so by a capital charge that makes the position uneconomic before the first trade.

The three regulators the letter addresses have each moved toward crypto permissiveness since early 2025.

The OCC reaffirmed in March 2025 that national banks may engage in crypto custody, stablecoin-related activities, and distributed-ledger payment functions, while removing the prior supervisory non-objection requirement.

The FDIC followed that same month, rescinding its notification requirement and allowing FDIC-supervised institutions to pursue permissible crypto activities without prior approval.

The Fed withdrew its guidance on crypto assets and dollar tokens in April 2025, framing the move as support for innovation.

All three agencies opened the door to crypto activity and left the Bitcoin capital question untouched.
The senators found their sharpest argumentative foothold in a March 2026 interagency FAQ on tokenized securities.

The joint guidance from the Fed, FDIC, and OCC held that eligible tokenized securities should generally receive the same capital treatment as their non-tokenized equivalents, and that the technology used to record or transfer ownership should not determine capital allocation.

If a tokenized Treasury is treated like a Treasury because the underlying risk profile governs its treatment, the logic should extend to Bitcoin, and the asset's volatility and operational risks are measurable and can support a calibrated framework.

The March 2026 guidance covers eligible tokenized securities, and the senators are pressing regulators to carry the same technology-neutral logic forward to native digital assets.

The prudential case for the rule

The Fed, FDIC, and OCC's 2023 joint statement noted price volatility, legal uncertainty regarding custody and ownership rights, contagion from exchange and counterparty failures, governance weaknesses in crypto networks, and operational risks associated with open or decentralized infrastructure.

The Basel standard was built around those risks after the 2022 crypto collapse exposed how quickly losses could spread to interconnected institutions.

A dollar-for-dollar capital charge reflects a genuine judgment that Bitcoin's risk profile does not resemble the assets that populate traditional bank balance sheets.

The senators argue that the risks of volatility, custody complexity, and operational exposure are quantifiable, and a calibrated capital framework can address them without requiring capital equal to or greater than the exposure itself.

The Basel Committee agreed in November 2025 to expedite a targeted review of elements of its cryptoasset standard, and reported progress on that review in February 2026.

Basel Chair Erik Thedéen has said the global crypto rules for banks need to be reworked after the US and UK both declined to implement the current framework.

A coalition of major financial industry groups wrote to Basel in August 2025, arguing that the standard would make meaningful bank participation uneconomical and requesting a pause and revisions.

The senators are pressing US regulators to act at a moment when the international architecture underpinning the 1,250% treatment is under open review.

Two paths from here

If regulators respond by proposing a calibrated framework for liquid digital assets instead of the blanket Basel weight, the capital required on $100 million of Bitcoin exposure could fall from the current $100 million-$150 million range to something closer to $8 million-$36 million under a 100%-300% risk-weight band and standard capital targets.

At that level, bank market-making, custody, prime brokerage, and structured crypto products become viable lines of business. Institutional liquidity improves, spreads compress, and banks move from service providers to balance-sheet participants.

If regulators keep 1,250% treatment as the practical standard for native crypto on-balance-sheet exposure while continuing to open other pathways, banks would continue offering custody and settlement, while direct Bitcoin exposure stays with nonbanks and ETF wrappers.

US-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs already saw roughly $4.4 billion in outflows through May 15 to June 3, showing that institutional access to Bitcoin has routed around bank balance sheets.

That channel will deepen if the capital rule stays intact.

The letter does raise the political cost of inaction while Congress is actively writing the market structure rules that will govern bank participation in digital assets for the next decade, and legal authorization to hold Bitcoin means little if the capital charge required to do so makes the position uneconomic from the first day it hits the balance sheet.

The post A little-known 1,250% rule could lock US banks out of Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin has done it again: From an all-time high of around $120,000, it has dropped to about $60,000 within a few months – a decrease of around 50%. Those who invested at the peak are now staring at a halved portfolio. However, those who invested with a clear plan and the right investment strategy are already familiar with this scenario from previous cycles and know: Right now is when the foundation for future returns is being laid.

Key Insights

• Bitcoin fell from about $120,000 to around $60,000 in 2025/2026 – a decline of about 50%, which is historically not unusual in the crypto space (comparable to 2017/18 and 2021/22).
• Dollar cost averaging (DCA) is a proven strategy where you regularly invest a fixed amount – regardless of the current price. This smooths out your entry price and helps you avoid the trap of market timing.
• Large investment funds and pension funds operate on the same principle: they invest regularly over decades instead of reacting to short-term market fluctuations.
• During crash phases, you as an investor have three options: continue DCA consistently, partially shift into stablecoins, or pause your savings plan and wait for recovery signals.
• The perfect entry point is less important than having a clear plan with defined risk, time horizon, and discipline – our savings plan and crypto savings plan comparison can help you find the right provider.

From Bitcoin's All-Time High to Crash – What DCA Has to Do with It

In early 2025, Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of around $126,000 – approximately $120,000. What followed is familiar to experienced customers of the crypto market: profit-taking, panic selling, and a price drop of around 50%. The price fell to values between $60,000 and $70,000.

Such crashes are not anomalies. In previous cycles – such as 2017/18 or 2021/22 – losses ranged from 40% to over 80%. Nevertheless, Bitcoin recovered each time and reached new highs.

The problem: Many beginners enter at the top, driven by FOMO and media hype, and sell in panic at the first major decline. DCA – dollar cost averaging – is the method that cushions this behavior. Instead of waiting for the supposedly perfect moment, you invest a fixed amount regularly in cryptos like $Bitcoin or $Ethereum.

In this article, we will show you how DCA works in crypto, how to strategically use crash phases, and how to invest step by step with a crypto savings plan – for example, through Bitpanda.

What is Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) in the Crypto Space?

Dollar-Cost-Averaging (DCA) means that you regularly buy a fixed amount of an asset – for example, €100 in Bitcoin every month. DCA allows for regular investments in cryptocurrencies without having to worry about the current price.

The cost averaging effect works like this:

• When prices are low, you automatically buy more units (e.g., more Satoshis). Investors buy more units at low prices and fewer at high prices.
• When prices are high, you buy fewer units – this creates an averaged entry price over time.
• DCA can lower the average cost per unit because you don’t buy everything at a single (possibly unfavorable) moment.
• DCA eliminates the stress of timing the purchase – you don’t need to understand technical chart analysis or market forecasts.

This method comes from traditional investing: ETF savings plans, mutual funds, and retirement plans operate on the same principle. DCA is simple for beginners and does not require extensive knowledge of cryptocurrency markets. It does not guarantee profits, but it limits psychological errors such as panic selling and impulsive trading.

Why DCA Makes Sense in Volatile Cryptocurrency Markets

The crypto market is notorious for its volatility. Daily movements of ±10% are not uncommon, and cycles where prices like Bitcoin drop from $120,000 to $60,000 are part of everyday life. DCA is particularly advantageous in volatile markets like cryptocurrencies because it allows you to take advantage of these fluctuations.

Market timing is extremely difficult in these markets. Even professional traders and analysts regularly miss the mark when it comes to identifying tops or bottoms. DCA reduces the risk of investing just before a market downturn because you spread your capital over many points in time.

DCA aims to reduce the effects of market volatility. Instead of letting market fluctuations control you, you automatically buy in bull and bear markets. This way, you benefit on average from the long-term trend of the asset.

Pension funds and retirement savings plans set the example: They regularly invest large sums in broadly diversified assets over decades without trying to perfectly time short-term fluctuations. DCA works particularly well for long-term crypto investors with a time horizon of 5 to 10+ years who believe in the fundamental value of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Strategies for Crash Phases: DCA, Stablecoins & Waiting

Bitcoin halves from $120,000 to $60,000. Many altcoins fall 70–90%. The monetary value in the portfolio shrinks. Emotions run high. Right now, the plan separates from the panic. Here are three options you have as an investor in such phases:

Option 1 – Continue Investing via DCA: Many long-term investors simply let their existing crypto savings plan continue. DCA allows for the purchase of more units at low prices – and that is the core of the strategy. Those who consistently invest during the crash significantly lower their average entry price. An example of DCA is a monthly investment of €100 – regardless of whether Bitcoin is at $120,000 or $60,000.

Option 2 – Partially Shift to Stablecoins: Some investors park a portion of their position in stablecoins (e.g., USDT, USDC, EURS). This secures liquidity and allows for larger special purchases when signs of recovery or further downward exaggerations appear.

Option 3 – Pause the Savings Plan and Monitor the Market: Some investors temporarily stop their DCA and analyze the situation: macro data like interest policy, on-chain data like hash rate or wallet activity, regulatory developments. Only when there are signals like rising trading volumes or breaking through important resistance levels do they become active again.

None of these options are “always right.” The right choice depends on your risk tolerance, liquidity, and time horizon. What matters is a pre-defined plan rather than spontaneous panic decisions.

Applying DCA Specifically: Examples and Avoiding Typical Mistakes

Imagine you invest €200 a month in Bitcoin over 24 months. Month 1 starts at the all-time high of $120,000. In the following months, the price falls to $60,000, partially recovers, and continues to fluctuate. DCA can lower the average purchase price of an asset – your averaged entry price will end up significantly below the top, perhaps at $80,000–90,000.

Here’s how to implement DCA correctly:

• Choose a fixed interval: monthly is standard, weekly smooths out more but incurs more fees.
• Determine an amount you can afford – e.g., €50, €100, or €500 per month. Never use money that you need in the short term for rent or emergencies.
• Focus on established coins with high market capitalization: Bitcoin and Ethereum have the longest history and the broadest acceptance.

Typical mistakes to avoid:

• Starting DCA and stopping after the first significant loss
• Constantly adjusting amounts up and down based on news
• Going completely “all-in” shortly after a hype or due to a QR code in an advertisement
• Buying too many speculative altcoins instead of focusing on quality assets

DCA is particularly suitable for established crypto assets. High-risk altcoins are often more cyclical and less predictable – DCA does not protect against permanent losses in those cases.

How to Start with DCA through Bitpanda (Step-by-Step Guide)

Bitpanda is a user-friendly platform that is particularly suitable for starting with DCA. DCA is suitable for beginners and long-term investors – and Bitpanda makes the process as easy as possible. Bitpanda is the only regulated crypto exchange under BaFin, which offers a high level of security.

Step 1 – Registration via Our Link: Click here, open a free account, and confirm your email address. The registration takes only a few minutes.

Step 2 – Identity Verification (KYC): Crypto exchanges must verify users with an ID. As a regulated provider, Bitpanda requires verification via ID or passport, possibly also via video identification – comparable to opening an account at a bank.

Step 3 – Deposit Euro Balance: Transfer euros to your Bitpanda account via SEPA or other payment methods. A SEPA deposit typically takes 1–2 banking days. Other deposits like credit cards are also possible depending on the region.

Step 4 – Set Up Crypto Savings Plan (Auto-Invest): In the app or on the website, you can create a savings plan for Bitcoin or other crypto assets. Choose your amount (e.g., €50 monthly), the interval, and the payment source. Many crypto exchanges offer automated savings plans for DCA – Bitpanda's Auto-Invest function is among the most convenient.

Step 5 – Regularly Check Your Portfolio, But Don’t Trade Daily: Review your plan at intervals of 3–6 months. Adjust the strategy as needed, but avoid frantic reactions to every price fluctuation. DCA requires long-term discipline and consistent purchases.

Our savings plan comparison provides additional information on how Bitpanda compares to other providers.

How to Find the Right Savings Plan Provider (Including Our Savings Plan Comparison)

A comparison of crypto savings plans is crucial because the differences in fees, coin selection, minimum amounts, and regulatory status are significant. Transaction costs can diminish returns with frequent purchases – that’s why it’s worth taking a close look at the fee structure.

Here’s an overview of the fees of important providers:

SMS-TAN procedures are considered less secure than app-based 2FA – ensure that your provider offers modern authentication. Bitvavo uses 2-Factor Authentication for added security. Kraken was founded in 2011 and has high security standards. Bison has a multi-layer security concept and is ISO certified.

A good DCA provider should meet the following criteria:

• Transparent fee structure without hidden costs
• Real cryptocurrencies (not just certificates or stock-like products)
• Regulated custody and licensing
• Easy setup for recurring purchases

Our crypto savings plan and exchange comparison presents these points clearly. Bitpanda offers a particularly straightforward way to get started: a wide selection of crypto assets, a convenient savings plan function, staking options, and the Bitpanda Card. Getting started through our referral link takes just a few minutes.

Still, keep in mind: The choice should always fit your own needs – risk profile, desired coins, additional features like rewards or payouts. The Trade Republic card or other financial products can also be sensibly used depending on your goals. Investors in the Netherlands may have different provider options than users in Germany.

Psychology & Long-Term Thinking: What We Can Learn from Investment and Pension Funds

Successful investing has less to do with “secret knowledge” than with discipline, patience, and a clear system. Large companies, pension funds, and retirement funds regularly invest large sums into broadly diversified portfolios over the years – monthly or quarterly. They do not try to time short-term fluctuations.

Individual investors can approach a Bitcoin or crypto savings plan similarly on a smaller scale: regular amounts, long investment horizon, clear strategy, no frantic trading or selling.

DCA promotes disciplined investing without emotional decisions. Emotional control is achieved through the automation of DCA – you don’t have to check the price every day and ponder over buying or selling. DCA minimizes emotional decisions while investing and reduces the impact of market volatility on your well-being.

In crash phases – such as the drop from $120,000 to $60,000 – the DCA investor knows: They are buying at a lower price now. The focus is on the long-term trend, not the daily price. This psychological influence is enormous and makes the difference between panic selling and calmly moving forward.

Long-term thinking also means viewing crypto only as part of the overall portfolio. Timeframes of 5 to 10+ years are realistic – just like with traditional investments in funds or stocks.

Risks & Limits of Dollar Cost Averaging in Crypto

DCA is a helpful toolset, but it is not a miracle solution. Crypto remains a risky asset class with the potential for total losses in individual projects. A realistic understanding of the limits is essential.

1. Risk of Persistently Low Prices: Some coins may never reach their previous all-time highs again. DCA does not protect against structurally poor investments—especially in speculative altcoins with low volume. The use of DCA should focus on assets with strong fundamentals.
2. Short-Term Losses Possible: DCA smooths out volatility but does not prevent price losses. Particularly with short time horizons of less than 3–5 years, the results can vary significantly. DCA can lead to lower returns in bull markets because you did not invest the entire amount at the low point.
3. Fee Accumulation: Many small trades create numerous individual transactions. The costs can add up, especially with providers that have high spreads or trading fees.
4. Evaluate Individual Factors: Financial situation, emergency funds, debts, investment goals, and risk tolerance should be thoroughly assessed before entering crypto. Crypto investments are not a substitute for a solid financial foundation. Be aware of tax implications (many individual purchases = many cost bases) and seek professional advice for larger amounts. Events such as regulatory changes or geopolitical developments can have additional impacts on the market.

DCA reduces the effects of market volatility—but it does not eliminate risk. Only invest money that you can afford to set aside for the long term.

FAQ

Is Dollar Cost Averaging in Crypto still worthwhile in 2026, after Bitcoin has fallen so much?

The principle of DCA is timeless because it does not depend on whether Bitcoin is currently at $20,000, $60,000, or $120,000. It’s about investing in installments over a longer period. Especially after significant pullbacks—like the drop from $120,000 to $60,000—DCA can be attractive for newcomers because the entry prices are significantly lower compared to the all-time high. DCA reduces the risk of investing just before a market downturn and provides a solid experience even for investors without deep market knowledge.

Should I stop my crypto savings plan during a crash?

That depends on your situation. Many long-term investors consciously keep their savings plan running to benefit from lower prices. Others pause for risk reasons—such as job insecurity or liquidity needs. The necessity of a predefined strategy is crucial here: Set conditions before the crash under which you will continue or pause (e.g., “I will maintain the savings plan until a price drop of X%”). This way, you avoid spontaneous panic decisions.

Which cryptocurrencies are best suited for DCA?

DCA is typically used for established, liquid cryptocurrencies—primarily Bitcoin and Ethereum, as they have the longest history and the highest market capitalization. Highly speculative altcoins with low volume can still pose a high risk for permanent losses or project failures, even with DCA. The advantages of DCA are most pronounced with assets in which you believe in the fundamental value over the long term.

Does it make sense to combine DCA with a portion in stablecoins?

Some investors park a portion of their regular deposits in stablecoins to make larger special purchases during significant downturns—such as an additional 20–30% price drop. This hybrid strategy is a sensible addition but makes implementation more complex. You should clearly define when and how the stablecoins will be converted back into crypto to avoid decision paralysis. A clear set of rules will help you with this.

How much should my monthly amount be for DCA in crypto?

The amount must always fit your individual situation. Crypto investments should not be funded with money that is needed in the short term for rent, emergencies, or debt repayment. Start with small amounts—e.g., $25–100 per month—and only increase after gaining experience and comfort over several months. Through Bitpanda, you can already set up a savings plan with low amounts and gradually build your portfolio.

The cryptocurrency market has suffered one of its most brutal corrections of the year, shedding more than 20% of its total valuation over the past seven days. Bitcoin ($BTC) plummeted below the critical $70,000 threshold to hit a low of $60,800, dragging the entire digital asset landscape down with it.

Ethereum ($ETH) collapsed to $1,560, while major altcoins faced aggressive selling pressure; Solana ($SOL) dropped to $62 and Ripple ($XRP) hovered at $1.08. This massive deleveraging event was not isolated to digital assets. Instead, it was triggered by a systemic macro-economic shock where everything that could go wrong for global financial markets went wrong simultaneously, wiping out a staggering $2.5 trillion in a single trading session.

Why are Markets Down?

The primary trigger for the market-wide liquidation began with the release of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics May employment report. The US economy added 172,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, obliterating Wall Street expectations of roughly 88,000.

While a robust labor market is typically a sign of economic health, it presents a major problem under current conditions. With inflation stubbornly stuck at 3.8% and crude oil trading at $90 per barrel, an overheating job market signals to the Federal Reserve that the economy is not cooling down. Consequently, the probability of an interest rate hike this year surged from 40% to 57% in a single day. Higher interest rates reduce the present value of risk assets, sending shockwaves through both tech equities and cryptocurrencies.

The AI Trade Cracks and Drags Down Tech

For months, the crypto market has enjoyed a strong correlation with high-growth artificial intelligence and semiconductor stocks. That correlation turned toxic when the AI tech narrative experienced its first major structural crack:

• Broadcom's Miss: Despite reporting a 48% increase in revenue and a 143% surge in AI chip sales, Broadcom stock crashed 12.6% because management failed to raise its forward-looking AI revenue targets.
• The Semiconductor Rout: A research report from SemiAnalysis revealed that Nvidia’s next-generation architecture will require roughly half the memory capacity previously priced in by the market. This sparked a global semiconductor sell-off, causing South Korea’s SK Hynix to drop 10%, Samsung to fall 6%, and South Korea's entire stock market to plunge 5.5%.
• Anthropic's Warning: Adding to the panic, AI safety firm Anthropic published a report warning that AI systems are nearing self-improvement capabilities without human intervention, calling for a global development pause.

This combination of decelerating corporate guidance and structural uncertainty forced institutional investors to question bloated tech valuations, causing a domino effect of liquidations that spilled directly into highly liquid crypto markets.

The Hidden Trillion-Dollar Liquidity Drain

Underneath the surface, a major liquidity crunch is actively starving the markets. Giant technology companies are preparing for massive public listings. SpaceX is targeting a $1.75 trillion public valuation next week, while both Anthropic and OpenAI have initialized filing processes.

Together, these upcoming listings represent between $4 trillion and $5 trillion in expected market value. Because cash reserves among institutional fund managers are at their lowest levels since early 2024, institutional players are forced to aggressively sell down their existing holdings—including highly liquid mega-cap cryptocurrencies—simply to raise the capital required to participate in these new listings.

Fed Leadership Uncertainty Sparks De-Risking

Compounding the panic is the upcoming Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 11 days. This marks the very first policy meeting for the newly appointed Federal Reserve Chair, Kevin Warsh, who took office under the Trump administration with market expectations of an aggressive rate-cutting agenda.

However, Chair Warsh is now walking straight into a macroeconomic trap of high inflation, surging energy prices, and a red-hot labor market. Because market participants have no historical precedent for how this new leadership will react to these conflicting metrics, institutional investors chose the safest option: aggressively de-risking portfolios and stepping to the sidelines.

Crypto Trading Strategy: How to Navigate a Market Crash

When systemic liquidations hit the digital asset space, emotional trading usually leads to severe capital destruction. Professional traders rely on strict risk-mitigation systems to preserve capital during a macro-driven market drawdown.

1. Capital Preservation via Stablecoins

During high-velocity crashes, velocity outweighs valuation. Converting portions of a portfolio into asset-backed stablecoins (such as USDC or USDT) removes directional market risk. This strategy halts portfolio drawdowns and builds dry powder, ensuring liquid capital is available to deploy once the market finds a structural bottom.

2. Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) Into Blue Chips

Attempting to catch the exact bottom of a crash is statistically unprofitable. A disciplined Dollar-Cost Averaging strategy breaks down your target investment allocation into fixed smaller amounts deployed at regular intervals (e.g., weekly or monthly). Focusing DCA allocations strictly on highly liquid blue-chip assets like $Bitcoin and $Ethereum minimizes the risk of holding illiquid altcoins that may fail to recover.

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3. Monitoring Derivative Liquidations and Funding Rates

Before entering new spot positions, traders should observe the derivatives market via platforms like Coinglass. A true market bottom is often preceded by a cascade of long liquidations and a shift in funding rates from positive to negative. When funding rates turn deeply negative, it indicates an oversold market where short sellers are paying a premium to hold their positions, often laying the groundwork for a short squeeze.

The cryptocurrency market faced severe downward pressure this past week, triggering sharp liquidations across several major alternative coins. While large-cap assets like Bitcoin struggled to maintain key support levels, multiple high-profile altcoins bore the brunt of the market sell-off, posting double-digit losses exceeding $25$.

Data from CoinMarketCap highlights a widespread correction driven by macro-economic factors, shifting regulatory environments, and liquidity drains from risk-on assets. Below is a detailed breakdown of the top five worst-performing altcoins over the last seven days.

1. Cardano (ADA)

$Cardano led the weekly losses among major layer-1 networks. The $ADA price plummeted by 32.19%, dropping its market capitalization to approximately $5.76 billion.

Despite continuous developer activity on the network, ADA struggled with a lack of short-term bullish catalysts. Heavy liquidations in futures markets exacerbated the spot price decline, pushing Cardano into heavily oversold territory on the daily relative strength index (RSI).

2. Aptos (APT)

$Aptos, another prominent layer-1 blockchain built for scalability, witnessed a 29.32% price reduction over the week. Trading at $0.6638 at the time of data collection, the asset's market cap contracted sharply to $544 million.

The steep drop is primarily attributed to a broader risk-off sentiment hitting newer smart-contract platforms, alongside scheduled token unlocks that increased circulating supply and diluted existing buy pressure.

3. Zcash (ZEC)

Privacy-centric cryptocurrency $Zcash experienced a volatile seven days. Despite booking a brief 19.34% recovery within a 24-hour window, its overall weekly performance stood at a negative 27.42%, trading at $374.80.

The sharp weekly decline reflects ongoing regulatory scrutiny surrounding privacy coins in various global jurisdictions, causing exchanges to de-risk and retail traders to reallocate capital into more transparent public ledgers.

4. Algorand (ALGO)

$Algorand fell by 27.06% over the past week, with its price sliding to $0.09321. The institutional-grade blockchain network saw its market cap shrink to $831 million.

ALGO’s downtrend mirrors the broader systemic outflow from decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems. The asset failed to sustain key psychological support levels, triggering automated stop-loss orders that accelerated the downward momentum.

5. Sei (SEI)

Rounding out the top five is $Sei, a sector-specific layer-1 blockchain optimized for trading. SEI registered a 26.12% loss over the seven-day period, pushing its price down to $0.04799 with a market cap of $340 million.

As a relatively new market entrant, SEI remains highly susceptible to aggressive speculative cycles. When broader market liquidity dries up, high-beta altcoins like SEI typically suffer deeper corrections as capital flows back into safer stables or fiat.

The Open Network (TON) ecosystem is facing severe operational turbulence as the native token, Toncoin ($TON), plummeted by over 18% in a sudden market rout, bottoming out at $1.53. The price collapse coincides with a cascade of critical infrastructure failures, leading to the shutdown of major decentralized applications, mini-programs, and ecosystem landing pages.

Multi-Chain Scaling Complexities Trigger Network Bottlenecks

The structural issues began mounting following recent protocol changes. While the network implemented sharding (fragmenting the blockchain into smaller subnets to split the transaction load), keeping those shards completely synchronized has proven difficult.

The dynamic nature of TON’s multi-chain system has created massive data bottlenecks. Blockchain monitoring tools reported heavy congestion, preventing decentralized wallets and validation layers from communicating seamlessly. Without stable cross-shard communication, the transaction finality slowed to a crawl, sparking panic among retail traders and automated liquidity providers.

Key Applications Go Dark: Fuse Mini-App and TON ID Offline

The most visible consequence of this infrastructure strain is the sudden dark state of key consumer applications. The Fuse Mini-App, a widely used application within the Telegram ecosystem for Web3 interaction, has completely stopped responding to user requests. Users trying to execute smart contract operations or interact with automated liquidity protocols have faced persistent timeout errors.

Simultaneously, the TON ID website, the foundational gateway for decentralized identity and user verification across the ecosystem, has gone completely down. Visitors are met with server connection failures, locking users out of decentralized applications (dApps) that rely on TON ID for authentication.

TON Ecosystem Status Monitor 

• TON ID Website: OFFLINE (Server Timeout) 
• Fuse Mini-App: UNRESPONSIVE (RPC Gateway Error) 
• TON Connect Layer: INTERMITTENT DEGRADATION

Furthermore, users attempting to authorize actions through $TON Connect have reported severe lag, failing to link their non-custodial wallets like Tonkeeper to third-party Telegram bots.

Whales Liquidate Positions Amid Centralization Concerns

The sudden technical breakdown has amplified existing market anxieties regarding the distribution and governance of the network. Telegram recently stepped in to take a prominent role as the network's dominant validator, sparking a fierce debate among DeFi purists regarding the actual decentralization of the blockchain.

On-chain data indicates that large token holders, or whales, began aggressively offloading supply into the liquid pools as the technical issues surfaced. The massive sell-side pressure easily broke past the immediate local support levels of $1.45 to $1.38, forcing a rapid correction down to the $1.53 region.

Ecosystem developers are currently scrambling to deploy hotfixes to the remote procedure call (RPC) nodes and node infrastructure to bring the front-end websites and mini-apps back online. However, until the synchronization issues between the network shards are fully resolved, trading volume remains highly volatile, and the risk of further liquidations hangs over the market.

Bitcoin Volatility Triggers Massive Leverage Unwinding

The cryptocurrency market faced intense selling pressure over the last 24 hours, driving massive liquidations across both major assets and altcoins. Bitcoin ($BTC) momentarily breached its critical psychological support level, dipping briefly below the $60,000 mark. This sharp downward move triggered a cascading wave of long liquidations throughout the derivatives market.

Following the brief plunge, aggressive buying volume at lower levels helped stabilize the premier cryptocurrency. Bitcoin managed an intraday recovery, readjusting back to its current trading price of $61,500. However, the brief breach of key support weakened market sentiment and left the altcoin sector highly vulnerable to deep, double-digit corrections.

Top 6 Altcoin Losers

While $Bitcoin managed to reclaim some ground, the broader altcoin market suffered severe capital outflows. Data from exchanges highlights the top six digital assets that lost the most value over the past 24 hours.

1. Zcash (ZEC)

$Zcash emerged as the hardest-hit asset in the market, experiencing a massive sell-off.

• Current Price: $379.66
• 24-Hour Performance: -23.65%
• 7-Day Performance: -28.83%
• Market Capitalization: $6,343,409,995

Market Insight: Despite a minor 5.61% hourly rebound, ZEC remains deeply negative for the week, experiencing a rapid liquidation cascade from its recent local highs.

2. Stable (STABLE)

The $STABLE token saw its recent positive momentum completely reverse over the last day.

• Current Price: $0.03223
• 24-Hour Performance: -18.10%
• 7-Day Performance: -16.57%
• Market Capitalization: $751,997,254

Market Insight: Even with a strong Year-to-Date (YTD) performance sitting at +130.55%, the token could not escape the broader market correction, losing nearly a fifth of its value in 24 hours.

3. Midnight (NIGHT)

$Midnight continued its multi-day downward trajectory, recording heavy losses as trading volume dried up.

• Current Price: $0.03146
• 24-Hour Performance: -16.84%
• 7-Day Performance: -9.64%
• Market Capitalization: $522,589,999

Market Insight: NIGHT showed minor hourly volatility (-0.48%) but continues to struggle structurally, with its YTD performance down 64.82%.

4. Filecoin (FIL)

$Filecoin faced heavy distribution, breaking below key support levels as sellers dominated the order books.

• Current Price: $0.7450
• 24-Hour Performance: -14.70%
• 7-Day Performance: -22.07%
• Market Capitalization: $586,971,496

Market Insight: FIL managed a minor 0.84% green hourly candle, but its macro trend remains firmly bearish, dragging its YTD performance down to -42.49%.

5. Polygon (POL)

$Polygon recently migrated native token faced aggressive capital flight during the market-wide de-risking phase.

• Current Price: $0.07599
• 24-Hour Performance: -14.51%
• 7-Day Performance: -14.76%
• Market Capitalization: $809,782,175

Market Insight: POL showed signs of an intraday bounce, rising 2.63% in the last hour, though it remains restricted under heavy overhead resistance.

6. Monero (XMR)

The prominent privacy coin $Monero rounds out the top six losers, falling alongside its sector peer, Zcash.

• Current Price: $320.93
• 24-Hour Performance: -14.46%
• 7-Day Performance: -13.99%
• Market Capitalization: $5,920,152,029

Market Insight: XMR experienced a 3.40% hourly bounce as traders stepped in near local support, but the asset faces a 24.16% deficit on the year.

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XRP ETFs have recorded the lowest weekly inflow since the past five weeks as momentum begins to slow in the new month and lesser capital entering into the product.

Zcash fell to a low of $250 following a two day drop before rebounding.

A large amount of Ethereum transfer has been traced to Ethereum’s co-founder, Joseph Lubin in a suspected sell-attempt as price volatility continues to intensify.

TLDR:

• Zooko Wilcox confirms users cannot independently verify if ZEC supply was hit by the Orchard flaw.
• The Ironwood upgrade would create a new shielded pool using the patched Orchard circuit upon activation.
• Turnstile mechanisms will block any excess ZEC from exiting the old Orchard pool after Ironwood activates.
• Wilcox says exploitation is unlikely but users should not rely on Shielded Labs’ assessment alone.

Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox has confirmed that users currently cannot independently verify whether ZEC’s circulating supply was affected by the recently disclosed Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability.

Wilcox, alongside Jason McGee and Taylor Hornby of Shielded Labs, published a proposal for the Ironwood network upgrade.

The upgrade would restore user-level supply verification through consensus rules. No deployment timeline has been announced.

Wilcox: Privacy Properties of Orchard Block Independent Verification

The Orchard vulnerability was patched through an emergency network upgrade completed on June 2. That fix closed the security gap, but it did not resolve a separate problem.

The privacy architecture of the Orchard pool makes it impossible for users to confirm whether the vulnerability was exploited before the patch.

Wilcox acknowledged that Shielded Labs believes exploitation was unlikely. However, he was direct about the limits of that position.

Users should not have to rely on the team’s assessment when verifying the integrity of the ZEC supply, he stated in the published proposal.

The proposed Ironwood upgrade addresses this gap at the protocol level. It would create a new shielded pool using the corrected Orchard circuit.

Simultaneously, any transaction attempting to create new outputs in the existing Orchard pool would be rejected as invalid.

Once Ironwood activates, users would gain immediate, trustless verification of the circulating supply. They would simply sum the balances across active pools by running a node, with no need to reason about other parties’ actions or wait for fund migrations to complete.

Ironwood’s Two-Outcome Framework Targets On-Chain Evidence of Counterfeiting

Wilcox and his co-authors structured Ironwood around what happens when users begin migrating funds out of the old Orchard pool. The migration process creates conditions that may surface evidence of whether counterfeiting occurred.

Any counterfeiter holding excess ZEC in the old pool would face two options. Moving those funds into the new pool would expose their existence on-chain. Leaving them behind would risk permanent inaccessibility as legitimate users complete their migrations.

Wilcox outlined two resulting outcomes. Under the first, no excess ZEC attempts to exit the old pool. That result would serve as strong on-chain evidence that the vulnerability was never exploited.

Under the second, excess ZEC attempts to cross the turnstile and gets blocked by the protocol, destroying those funds while creating publicly verifiable proof of counterfeiting.

Turnstiles, Zcash’s existing cross-pool accounting mechanism, enforce these rules automatically. They track the total ZEC entering each pool and reject any withdrawal attempt that exceeds the legitimate balance. This prevents excess ZEC from escaping into other pools regardless of outcome.

Wilcox recommended that all wallets supporting the existing Orchard pool add support for the new one ahead of activation.

Existing Orchard addresses would remain valid after Ironwood activates, with incoming ZEC automatically received in the new pool. The team noted that the transition from zcashd to the Zebra node client may affect the upgrade’s timing.

The post Zcash’s Orchard Vulnerability Leaves Users Unable to Verify ZEC Circulating Supply, Says Zooko Wilcox appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Peter Schiff warns Bitcoin could plunge to $30,000 if sellers force a decisive break below $50,000.
• Bitcoin’s RSI dropped below 30, highlighting extreme bearish momentum and oversold market conditions.
• Prediction markets assign an 83% probability that Bitcoin trades below $55,000 during 2026.
• BTC remains trapped between $60K and $61.8K as traders await a breakout from consolidation.

Bearish sentiment about BTC intensified across markets following renewed warnings from economist Peter Schiff in recent sessions.

Schiff predicted a potential drop toward $30,000, arguing that complacency among investors remains at excessively high levels. 

He stated that a break below $50,000 could trigger a rapid move toward lower levels in markets. He suggested that Market sentiment remains fragile amid macroeconomic uncertainty. 

Market data shows Bitcoin RSI falling below 30, indicating strong selling pressure in recent sessions. However, readings below 30 sometimes signal oversold conditions that can precede short-term relief rallies in markets. 

Furthermore, Strategy’s sale of 32 Bitcoins worth approximately $2.5 million during the late May period marked a bearish transition for traders. This marked their first reduction since 2022. 

Polymarket contracts saw about $15 million in trading volume tied to Bitcoin price outcomes recently. Traders are still monitoring macroeconomic signals for direction. Sentiment remains cautious among institutional investors.

Schiff Warns of Deeper Market Correction

Peter Schiff reiterated expectations of a deeper Bitcoin correction, citing persistent investor complacency across current market conditions. He argued that a break below $50,000 could accelerate selling toward $30,000 levels rapidly in markets. 

Market observers remain divided on near-term Bitcoin trajectory. He also suggested Bitcoin weakness could signal broader risk asset declines across markets globally.

He questioned whether Bitcoin would act as a harbinger for wider financial turbulence globally. Risk sentiment across crypto markets remains highly reactive. 

He linked Bitcoin weakness to political debates surrounding proposed strategic Bitcoin reserve policies in the United States.

He claimed that pressure could build from crypto supporters seeking government-backed interventions in the future. Regulatory discussions continue to influence investor positioning.

Market Structure and Technical Pressure Intensify

Bitcoin traded in a narrow consolidation range between $59,300 and $61,800 during recent sessions this week. Analysts noted repeated resistance near $61,500 as bullish momentum continued to weaken in markets. 

Price action showed lower highs forming after an initial sharp upward spike earlier. A brief dip below $60,000 suggested stop-loss activity and liquidity-driven volatility recently. Support remained concentrated near $60,000 while resistance held between $61,500 and $62,000 levels. 

Market participants awaited a breakout direction as trading volume gradually declined recently. Volatility remains elevated across major trading sessions. Short-term traders reacted quickly to intraday price swings. 

Market makers adjusted positions throughout the session. Liquidity conditions appear thinner during consolidation phases. Investors await clearer directional signals.

The post Peter Schiff Warns Bitcoin Could Crash to $30K as Market Faces Rising Bearish Pressure appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• BitMEX Research disputes claims of $64B spent vs $50B BTC value, calling it an incomplete accounting view
• Strategy raised capital via premium stock issuance, boosting shareholder value beyond Bitcoin price
• Michael Saylor Bitcoin Strategy spans multiple cycles, combining cash, debt, and equity funding
• Debate centers on valuation method, not BTC holdings, amid volatile crypto market conditions

Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin Strategy has returned to the spotlight after Arkam data suggests that Strategy spent nearly $64 billion acquiring Bitcoin, which is now worth considerably less.

However, new analysis argues the narrative overlooks how the company generated shareholder value while building one of the largest corporate Bitcoin positions in history.

BitMEX Research Pushes Back Against $14 Billion Loss Claims

The latest debate emerged after data circulated online suggesting that Michael Saylor’s company spent roughly $64 billion to accumulate Bitcoin, which is currently valued at near $50 billion. Critics quickly framed the difference as evidence of a multibillion-dollar paper loss.

Some observers questioned whether Strategy’s aggressive accumulation model had exposed shareholders to excessive risk.

The discussion focused primarily on Bitcoin’s current market value compared to the total capital deployed over several years.

However, BitMEX Research challenged that conclusion. In a public response, the research firm argued that measuring Strategy’s performance solely through Bitcoin’s market value presents an incomplete picture.

According to the firm, Michael Saylor generated substantial shareholder value by issuing stock at significant premiums while demand for Strategy shares remained elevated.

BitMEX Research noted that although Bitcoin’s price may have declined from certain purchase levels, the company benefited from investors willingly paying premium valuations for exposure to its Bitcoin-focused corporate structure. As a result, shareholder value creation extended beyond Bitcoin’s spot price performance.

Michael Saylor Bitcoin Strategy Centers on Long-Term Capital Allocation

The Michael Saylor Bitcoin Strategy has never been based on short-term price movements. Since initiating Bitcoin purchases in 2020, Strategy has consistently accumulated the asset through market rallies, corrections, and prolonged downturns.

The company initially deployed cash reserves before expanding acquisitions through convertible notes and equity offerings.

Rather than pausing purchases during volatile periods, Strategy continued increasing its Bitcoin holdings across multiple market cycles.

Saylor has repeatedly described Bitcoin as a superior store of value and a scarce digital asset capable of preserving purchasing power over long periods. Under that framework, temporary drawdowns are viewed differently from traditional investment losses.

Supporters of the strategy argue that the strategy effectively transformed itself into a publicly traded vehicle offering leveraged Bitcoin exposure.

This structure enabled the company to access capital markets while benefiting from strong investor demand for its shares.

Critics remain focused on concentration risk and the company’s dependence on Bitcoin’s future performance. Yet the current debate increasingly revolves around valuation methodology rather than Bitcoin ownership itself.

For now, BitMEX Research maintains that Michael Saylor is assuming the shareholder value created through premium stock issuance.

As Bitcoin continues to fluctuate, the discussion surrounding Strategy’s approach remains one of the most closely watched narratives in corporate finance and digital assets.

The post Beyond Bitcoin’s Price: Why BitMEX Research Defends Michael Saylor’s Strategy Model appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Glassnode data shows Bitcoin long-term holders shifting from distribution to re-accumulation phase
• Bitcoin tests $60K support while RSI nears 15, signaling oversold momentum conditions now
• Price structure shows lower highs and potential double-bottom forming near key support zone
• Reduced liquid supply from long-term holders may strengthen price response if demand remains stable

Bitcoin is experiencing a notable shift in long-term supply behavior alongside a critical technical test in price structure.

Glassnode’s Old Supply Net Position Change metric has moved back into positive territory after nearly two years of sustained distribution.

Bitcoin held for more than six months is now being accumulated rather than spent. This change coincides with broader adjustments in spot and derivatives market activity.

Long-term Holders Return to Accumulation after Extended Distribution Phase

Glassnode data previously showed prolonged negative readings as long-term holders reduced exposure during price rallies.

These distribution phases aligned with the 2024 and 2025 uptrends when veteran investors realized profits at elevated levels.

This selling increased circulating supply and supported absorption from institutional and retail demand. On-chain data suggests this phase marked consistent profit realization during upward price movements.

The current transition shows the indicator crossing above zero after an extended negative period. Data indicates that dormant coins beyond six months are no longer actively spent.

Instead, inactive Bitcoins are rising as holders keep coins off exchanges. Exchange flow data reinforces the view that supply was actively redistributed during the earlier phase.

Market participants now interpret the change as a shift in holder psychology toward longer holding periods. Even near elevated price levels, long-term investors appear less willing to liquidate positions for profit.

This behavior reflects expectations of continued market strength or higher future valuation. The absence of aggressive selling supports strengthening conviction among holders.

Bitcoin tests key $60,000 support as RSI signals extreme oversold conditions

Bitcoin trades near a critical support zone between $60,000 and $61,000 during the ongoing corrective phase. The level has repeatedly acted as a structural floor throughout the current market cycle.

Price action continues to show lower highs and lower lows since the cycle peak. Market volatility has compressed around this level as buyers and sellers contest direction.

Technical indicators show RSI near 15, indicating deeply oversold market conditions. Historically, such readings have coincided with selling exhaustion and potential relief rebounds.

Market participants note that weak hands typically exit positions during these momentum extremes. Such technical alignment often attracts attention from traders seeking short-term reversal opportunities.

The $60,000 level represents both psychological and technical support for Bitcoin. A sustained hold could shift market structure toward accumulation and potential recovery.

Price action over the next sessions may determine whether consolidation or recovery develops. A breakdown below this zone would expose the market to deeper downside pressure.

The post B Long-Term Holders Shift to Accumulation as $60K Support Faces Test appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Senator Cynthia Lummis describes the CLARITY Act as the most consequential financial bill today.
• The legislation establishes clear SEC and CFTC oversight rules for digital asset classification.
• Tokens meeting decentralization standards may transition from securities to commodities oversight.
• Senate negotiations continue on stablecoins, DeFi protections, and expanded crypto tax reporting

CLARITY Act advances in the United States Congress as lawmakers shape a digital asset regulatory framework during the 2026 legislative cycle.

Senator Cynthia Lummis describes the CLARITY Act as a defining financial legislation effort in the ongoing Senate discussion.

Lawmakers passed the bill in the House in July 2025 and advanced Senate committee versions in the 2026 stage. Negotiations are still ongoing over stablecoin rules, DeFi treatment, and tax reporting requirements within the Senate framework committees.

Congress advances CLARITY Act with SEC and CFTC division model

Lawmakers advanced the CLARITY Act after the House passed it with bipartisan support in July 2025, final vote. Senate committees reviewed the legislation and approved versions for consolidation into a unified draft process stage in the 2026 cycle.

Senator Cynthia Lummis played a central role in shaping regulatory language and the bipartisan coordination process.

The CLARITY Act establishes a framework that divides SEC and CFTC authority for digital asset classification system rules structure.

Classification depends on decentralization, control, and network structure under federal regulatory criteria applied across the token assessment process framework. Assets that pass the mature blockchain test may shift from SEC oversight to CFTC jurisdiction over time.

Market participants monitor classification outcomes as they affect compliance planning across crypto industries under an evolving regulatory framework.

Industry stakeholders are evaluating how decentralization thresholds may influence long-term token governance structures across blockchain networks review process stage.

Developers and exchanges adjust operations based on regulatory expectations and classification outcomes within the compliance planning cycle framework stage.

Stablecoin rules and exchange oversight in CLARITY Act framework

Senate negotiators are reviewing stablecoin provisions within the CLARITY Act framework during the ongoing legislative discussion stage cycle.

Provisions address restrictions on yield-like rewards and define boundaries for stablecoin financial activity under regulatory framework review process.

Final rules depend on Senate agreement and technical drafting between committees for the final legislative approval process.

The CLARITY Act requires centralized exchanges and intermediaries to register under CFTC oversight framework for compliance enforcement.

Registration introduces customer protection reporting and transparency obligations similar to traditional financial markets within a regulated system framework.

The bill expands tax reporting definitions, requiring more broker disclosures through Form 1099-DA filings to the Internal Revenue Service.

The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act provision is meant to protect non-custodial developers within a decentralized protocol framework under specific legal conditions.

It distinguishes decentralized protocols from custodial intermediaries that control user assets directly under regulatory classification rules framework.

The post Senator Cynthia Lummis Calls CLARITY Act the Most Consequential Financial Legislation of This Generation appeared first on Blockonomi.

It’s safe to say that the cryptocurrency market has seen better days. In fact, such days were promised by the current US President, Donald Trump.

And, for some time, they were here. Now, though, we are far behind, with the prices of almost all digital assets trading below his inauguration day and even lower than the pre-election weeks.

Trump’s Major Promises

Remember 2024? It was a highly eventful year, especially when it came down to the presidential election. On one hand, we had Kamala Harris, who was expected to continue many of Joe Biden’s policies, including those against the cryptocurrency industry.

On the other hand, we had Donald Trump. Although his history with bitcoin and co was not very pleasant from his first time in office, he tried to make amends and started praising the asset class. Moreover, he started calling himself the ‘crypto president,’ and attended the largest Bitcoin conference in the US, where he had a passionate speech about BTC and how he would personally fire then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler (even though he can’t really).

Hell, he even paid for a burger in New York with bitcoin. In addition, he made multiple grand promises about how the US will become the global hub for the industry, that all remaining bitcoin should be mined in the States, and that there will be a national BTC strategy reserve.

The community was quickly sold, as they hadn’t seen anything like this in the past. They were used to ignorance or hatred from the White House. Consequently, prominent names from the industry started throwing funds toward his campaign in the hope of a better future for us all.

Reality Check: 18 Months Later

Given his promises, the entire market skyrocketed in the months after Trump’s landslide victory in the elections. The hype was real, but so were the price pumps. Then came the highly controversial launch of two meme coins linked to him and his wife, but we won’t even go down that rabbit hole here. We are only going to mention that they launched just days before his inauguration.

Prices kept pumping, for the most part, excluding the ‘Liberation Day’ fiasco and the mid-year drop, but BTC, ETH, XRP, and many other alts still managed to post new ATHs by October. Things were looking up.

And then it all went down the crapper. The single-largest liquidation day in early October was just the beginning, as BTC kept dropping. Long story short, bitcoin plunged to $59,000 on Friday, which was its lowest position since before the elections. Most crypto assets have done the same, in a more painful manner.

But the numbers since the inauguration – the date that the so-called ‘crypto president’ officially returned to the White House, where he was supposed to fulfill his many promises – are even worse, as the tweet below will show.

Crypto prices since Trump took office: $BTC -44% $ETH -49% $XRP -68% $SOL -77% $DOGE -79% $AVAX -82%$ADA -85% $SUI -86% $ENA -92% $APT -93% $TRUMP -97.7%$MELANIA -99.5%

WE KEEP WINNING RIGHT ..

— Crypto Tony (@CryptoTony__) June 5, 2026

The post Here’s How Much BTC, ETH, XRP Have Dumped Since ‘Crypto President’ Trump Took Office appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Friday was a brutal day for essentially all financial markets, even though the only notable news that went live was positive, as the US saw the strongest jobs report in a year and a half.

The analysts at the Kobeissi Letter tried to simplify what transpired and explain why markets reacted in such a painful manner.

What Exactly Happened?

If you are reading this, you are probably aware of what took place in the crypto markets. Bitcoin plunged to $59,100 for the first time since November 2024, dragging the entire altcoin field with it and triggering over $1.7 billion in liquidations at one point. But, the crash was not just in crypto.

Gold, traditionally regarded as a safe-haven tool known for its stability, dumped by over 4% in a day from more than $4,500 to $4,315. Wall Street experienced a similar decline, with the S&P 500 erasing $2 trillion from its market cap in a single trading session. The Nasdaq 100 printed seven consecutive hourly red candles during the day in what became its worst drop since Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” from over a year ago.

And most of those losses took place after the US jobs report went live, which was highly promising – the strongest in 18 months. This financial crash, then, appears puzzling, and even the POTUS himself seemed confused by this situation.

So Why Down Then?

However, such good news does not appear to be beneficial to BTC and other risk-on assets, according to some analysts.

“Strong jobs data kills the rate cut narrative. Bitcoin, already down 15% and sitting on uncleared leveraged longs, has no macro catalyst to recover into, and Middle East tensions are keeping risk appetite soft across markets,” told us the analysts from Nansen.

Their colleagues at the Kobeissi Letter concurred, indicating that when the Fed made its first rate cuts of 2025, it was “specifically because of labor market weakness,” not because the inflation had reached or even neared the 2% target.

With inflation skyrocketing again due to the war against Iran, the bond market has held on to “hopes of rate cuts for some time because of the “weak” labor market.” The jobs report from Friday, though, has “flipped that sentiment, and the weakness of the labor market is being questioned.”

Additionally, the report showed that job openings rose by over 730,000 positions in April, while experts anticipated no change. Available employment jumped to 7.6 million for the month, the highest in two years.

The result of all of the above means that markets have seen the “most hawkish shift in Fed expectations since post-pandemic stimulus.” Experts now believe there will be rate hikes by early 2026, while the overall expectations until months ago suggested up to 4 cuts.

Adding even more fuel to the fire is the drawdown in crypto, with Bitcoin now down -53% since October.

In fact, Bitcoin is down 20% this week ALONE, with crypto erasing ~$2.5 trillion since October 2025.

The bear market gained momentum this week and crushed risk appetite. pic.twitter.com/48WL0tsjqv

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) June 5, 2026

Separately, reports claimed recently that Meta is considering raising “tens of billions of dollars” through a stock offering to fund AI development, similar to Google’s $85 billion raise. Such moves increase investor concerns as big tech could start flooding the market with equity raises to fund AI growth.

SpaceX’s IPO, scheduled for June 12, could also be among the culprits, as “funds are likely selling to make room” for this major event.

“Sum it all up, and the market, which was up 20%+ in 2 months, was overdue for today’s decline,” concluded the analysts.

The post Friday’s Market Meltdown: What Sent Bitcoin, Gold, and Wall Street Tumbling? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum has entered a decisive bearish phase after losing multiple high-timeframe support levels in a matter of days. The latest sell-off pushed ETH through a major confluence zone that had previously acted as support throughout the first half of the year, placing the market at a critical juncture where buyers must defend lower demand levels to prevent a deeper correction.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Weekly Chart

The weekly chart shows a significant deterioration in market structure. After peaking near $5K, ETH established a series of lower highs beneath a descending trendline that has capped every major recovery attempt since late 2025. The recent rejection from this trendline reinforced bearish control and accelerated the latest downside move.

More importantly, ETH has now broken below the major support area around $1.75K-$1.85K, a zone that previously acted as a key pivot during the March rebound. The breakdown confirms a bearish continuation pattern and shifts focus toward the next demand region around $1.45K-$1.55K.

The current weekly candle is testing the upper boundary of that support zone, with price trading near $1.56K. A weekly close below this region would significantly increase the probability of an extension toward the broader demand area around $1.15K-$1.30K, which represents the next major historical support visible on the chart.

For bulls to regain momentum, ETH would first need to reclaim the broken $1.75K-$1.85K region and eventually break above the descending trendline resistance. Until then, the broader structure remains bearish.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart highlights the severity of the recent sell-off. ETH broke down from a prolonged descending structure without establishing any meaningful support. The blue support zone between roughly $1.74K and $1.85K, which had previously acted as a major demand area and also aligns with the 0.5-0.618 Fib levels, failed to contain selling pressure and has now turned into resistance.

ETH is currently testing the lower demand zone around $1.50K-$1.57K, where some reactive buying has emerged. However, the rebound remains limited and does not yet indicate a sustainable trend reversal. If this support area fails to hold, the next downside objective could emerge below $1.50K. On the other hand, any relief rally would likely encounter resistance around $1.74K-$1.85K, followed by the Fibonacci cluster between $1.88K and $1.92K.

Sentiment Analysis

The 3-month liquidation heatmap suggests that a substantial amount of downside liquidity has already been cleared during the latest cascade lower. As ETH plunged from above $2K toward $1.5K, most of the notable liquidation clusters beneath the market were swept, reducing the immediate magnetic effect from lower levels.

Meanwhile, the most significant remaining liquidity concentrations are now positioned above the current price, particularly in the $1.7K-$1.9K region and extending toward the $2.4K-$2.5K area. This creates an interesting dynamic where the market lacks major nearby liquidity targets below spot while maintaining sizeable overhead liquidation pools.

However, the absence of significant liquidity beneath price does not necessarily imply an immediate reversal. Instead, it suggests that ETH may enter a period of consolidation or corrective rebound before establishing its next directional move. If buyers fail to reclaim broken support levels, the market could still experience a deeper retracement driven by spot selling rather than liquidation hunting.

For now, Ethereum remains under strong bearish pressure, but with most nearby downside liquidity already swept, traders should closely monitor whether the $1.45K-$1.55K support zone can stabilise price and trigger a relief recovery toward the newly formed resistance overhead.

The post Ethereum Price Prediction: Will ETH Dump Toward $1K Next? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

As bitcoin (BTC) continues to weather the storms of the bear market, the asset’s OG holders are waking up. A few days ago, an anonymous holder redeemed a physical bitcoin 15 years after it was created, receiving 25 BTC from the redemption.

According to a tweet from Galaxy Research, the physical coin redeemed is an S1-COIN-25, part of the Casascius coins created between 2011 and 2013. The redemption netted over $1.78 million in bitcoin, calculated at current prices.

OG Holder Redeems 25 BTC

A Casascius coin is a physical token created by the early Bitcoin adopter and software engineer Mike Caldwell. The tokens were created with denominations of 0.5, 1, 5, 10, 25, 100, and 1,000 BTC, meaning they held real digital bitcoins. With receiving bitcoin addresses printed on the outside, each coin has a tamper-evident hologram concealing the matching private key at the back.

Caldwell created brass, fine silver, gold-plated coins, and gold-plated bars, with their sizes ranging from 25.4 mm to 30 mm in diameter. The bars would weigh about 12 ounces if they were solid gold, but since they are metal alloys with gold plating, they weigh 4.2 ounces instead. They were all available as pre-loaded BTC coins and bars and are currently available on secondary markets like eBay, even though Caldwell stopped production in 2013 because he was operating as a money transmitter without a license.

To redeem the coins, one has to peel the hologram at the back of the token to retrieve the private keys. The coin’s balance can be verified on platforms like Block Explorer by inputting the eight-character code seen on the outside of the coin.

From Conversation Pieces to Storage Vessels

Over the last 15 years, Casascius coin holders have redeemed their tokens for BTC, netting millions of dollars in profits. Some of the coins were worth less than $100 dollars at creation, but bitcoin’s rally over the years has increased their value significantly. These coins were created as conversation pieces to help talk to people about BTC; however, they ended up as forms of storing the asset long after their production.

The Casascius coin that was redeemed within the week was created in December 2011 alongside thousands of other coins. In fact, data from the Casascius tracker shows that there are 27,916 coins and bars in existence, 10,479 of those having been opened. The collective value of the coins and bars created now stands above $6.2 billion, given bitcoin’s latest price.

Meanwhile, the latest redemption comes as other OG holders wake up to move long-dormant assets.

The post OG Bitcoin Holder Wakes Up, Redeems Casascius Coin For 25 BTC After 15 Years appeared first on CryptoPotato.

In such times of distress, in which the broader crypto market has experienced a sudden and painful decline, Cardano’s co-founder decided to take a break after a short and bitter announcement on X.

Charles Hoskinson’s decision only worsened ADA’s positioning, as the asset tumbled by double digits on Friday and dumped below $0.19 at the time. It kept plunging in the following hours and slumped to under $0.16 later that day, which became its lowest price level since December 2020. The question we asked ChatGPT’s latest version is how low the token can go now.

Consequences for Cardano and ADA

The numbers paint a clear story for ADA. At one point on Friday, it was down by 14% on a 24-hour scale. The weekly losses are up to 30%, while the monthly decline is at 40%. The macro view paints an even more catastrophic picture, with a 75% value reduction in the past year and a whopping 94.7% drop since its all-time high seen in September 2021.

As such, Hoskinson’s move expectedly caused a lot of controversy immediately, with the social media comments exploding. A few praised his decision, others doubted it, and some lashed out.

ChatGPT reassured that Hoskinson has not resigned from Cardano, but the timing matters. His announcement came shortly after the shutdown of major ecosystem participants, the cancellation of Cardano’s flagship summit, and public warnings that additional projects and DeFi applications could disappear before the end of the year.

“The market is treating the move as a vote of no confidence. Whether that interpretation is fair or not is almost irrelevant. Crypto markets are driven by narratives and the current dominant one is that Cardano’s ecosystem is shrinking while competitors continue to attract developers, liquidity, and users,” the AI stated.

So, How Low?

After acknowledging that ADA has already erased years of gains with its drop below $0.17, ChatGPT warned that it could still have room to fall if sentiment continues deteriorating.

Its bearish scenario envisions another leg down, perhaps toward $0.12. If that level cracks, then Cardano’s native asset could be on the way down to even under $0.10. Extreme capitulation sees a decline to $0.08, while the “nuclear scenario” from the AI platform outlined $0.05 as the lowest target.

“For ADA to trade below five cents, Cardano would likely need to enter a prolonged death spiral involving developer departures, collapsing liquidity, and a broader crypto bear market,” it concluded.

The post How Low Could ADA Fall Without Hoskinson? AI Issues Stark Warning appeared first on CryptoPotato.