Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Gold prices have fallen sharply to about $4,340, making this the largest weekly drop in over 40 years. This comes even as the conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran enters its fifth week,

At the same time, the crypto market is also down by 1.6%. Meanwhile, flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin has slipped from $76,000 to around $68,000, raising concern in markets around the world

Why is the Gold Price Crashing Today?According to recent market data, gold prices dropped below $4,340, marking one of the biggest declines this year. Gold had earlier reached nearly $4,600 in March, but suddenly fell nearly 5% in a single day.

The main reason behind this drop is rising U.S. 10-year Treasury yields, which have climbed to around 4.40%, increasing nearly 45 basis points in just three weeks. A stronger dollar usually pushes gold prices lower.

Another major reason is forced liquidation. In just a few hours, gold and silver together erased nearly $2 trillion in market value. Silver alone fell below $65, dropping more than 4%, and wiping out around $150 billion in market cap.

Also, rising oil prices near $112 are increasing inflation concerns. This makes markets expect the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates high until at least 2027. Polymarket traders see a 75% chance of no rate cuts in 2026.

Recently, Donald Trump issued a two-day ultimatum to Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face potential strikes on power plants. In response, Iran warned it could shut the crucial waterway and target energy and infrastructure facilities if attacked. This increased geopolitical tension, but gold still fell instead of rising.

How Falling Gold Prices Are Impacting the Crypto MarketThe crypto market is also feeling the pressure. The total crypto market cap has dropped around 1.6% to $2.34 trillion. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has fallen to near $68,000 after recently touching $76,000.

Other major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and Dogecoin have also fallen around 3%. 

Currently, Bitcoin is not acting like gold. Instead, it behaves more like a liquidity asset, moving with interest rates and money supply. When rates rise and liquidity tightens, both stocks and crypto usually fall.

However, one important long-term trend is that Spot Bitcoin ETFs have attracted $56 billion in less than 2 years, almost matching gold ETF inflows built over 15 years, making Bitcoin ETFs one of the fastest capital accumulation stories in ETF history.

Bitcoin vs Gold Chart PredictionCrypto trader Blade shared the BTC/Gold chart, showing a repeating historical pattern. According to the chart, Bitcoin usually consolidates against gold for around 14 months, and then enters a strong expansion phase.

The same structure appears to be forming again in 2026, which could mean Bitcoin may soon start outperforming gold in the next phase of the cycle.

If this happen bitcoin will soon retest its all-time-high price of $126K.

Never Miss a Beat in the Crypto World!Stay ahead with breaking news, expert analysis, and real-time updates on the latest trends in Bitcoin, altcoins, DeFi, NFTs, and more.

FAQsWhy is gold price crashing today?

Gold is falling due to rising US bond yields, a stronger dollar, and forced liquidation, which are reducing demand despite ongoing geopolitical tensions.

Why didn’t geopolitical tensions push gold higher?

Although tensions usually boost gold, strong yields, tight liquidity, and forced selling are currently outweighing its safe-haven demand.

How is the gold crash affecting Bitcoin and crypto?

Gold’s drop signals tighter liquidity, which is also pressuring crypto markets, causing Bitcoin and altcoins to fall alongside risk assets.

Can Bitcoin outperform gold after this drop?

Bitcoin may outperform gold if historical patterns repeat, especially as ETF inflows grow and liquidity conditions improve over time.

Story Ends Here

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Read the Next News

Gold’s 21% Fall Forms 106 Year Record While Bitcoin Stabilizes At $71,000

Robert Kiyosaki said current economic pressure reflects changes that began in the 1970s. 

Summary

Kiyosaki said 1974 policy shifts still shape debt, inflation, retirement pressure, and demand for Bitcoin. He warned baby boomers may face retirement income gaps as pensions gave way to market-based accounts. Santiment data showed Bitcoin bearish sentiment rose, while contrarian traders watched fear levels for reversal signs. Robert Kiyosaki said 1974 marked a major shift in how money and retirement worked in the United States. In a post on X, he wrote that “the future created in 1974 has arrived” and tied today’s financial stress to policy changes from that period.

He connected that year to the petrodollar system and to changes in retirement planning. Kiyosaki said those changes helped shape the debt and inflation concerns now facing households and investors.

Retirement concerns remain part of his warning Kiyosaki also referred to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act and the wider move away from pension structures that paid workers for life. He said many workers now depend on market-based retirement accounts instead of guaranteed income after leaving work.

He warned that this shift placed more responsibility on individuals. In the same post, he wrote that “millions of baby-boomers will soon find out they have no income once they stop working,” linking that concern to long-term pressure on retirement security.

In addition, Kiyosaki repeated his long-running support for gold, silver, and Bitcoin. He described those assets as “real money” and said people should focus on financial education while looking at alternative stores of value.

His latest remarks follow similar warnings from recent months. Last month, he said a major financial “bubble burst” could send capital into scarce assets and push Bitcoin much higher. He also said Bitcoin could reach $750,000 within a year after such a crash.

Bitcoin sentiment turns more negative At press time, Bitcoin traded near $66,826. Kiyosaki’s latest comments arrived as market sentiment around the asset weakened. Data from Santiment showed bearish discussion on social platforms rose to its highest level since late February.

The platform said the bullish-to-bearish comment ratio fell to 0.81, showing weaker confidence among traders. Santiment also said that extreme fear can sometimes act as a contrarian signal, with markets often moving against the crowd when negative sentiment grows too strong.

Bitcoin Stays on Top for 8 Years: Most Cryptos Vanished

Which is the Safe Haven? Bitcoin (BTC) or Gold? A Chinese Analyst Explains!

29.04.2026 - 16:06

Update: 29.04.2026 - 16:06

The rivalry between Bitcoin (BTC) and gold has been going on for years. While both have numerous proponents, a Bitcoin supporter has made some significant statements.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, appearing on the Invest Like The Best podcast, argued that Bitcoin has surpassed gold as the best hedge against inflation.

Paul Tudor Jones, who invested in gold for many years and made a lot of money from it, claims that Bitcoin is “undoubtedly the best inflation hedge.”

Noting Bitcoin’s limited supply of 21 million coins, Jones described Bitcoin as the most suitable hedge against inflation, citing its limited supply and decentralized network.

He emphasized that these features make Bitcoin far superior to gold.

“Bitcoin is one of the opportunities not to be missed and, without a doubt, the best inflation hedge available.”

While acknowledging Bitcoin’s advantages, Jones also acknowledged concerns about potential cyber warfare and quantum computing risks. He warned investors to exercise caution.

“With artificial intelligence advancing so rapidly, who knows when and how we’ll reach quantum computer technology where someone could come along and hack any bank and anything else they want?”

*This is not investment advice.

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As I write this in 2026, the world is becoming more multipolar, and I expect that trend to continue over the next decade through 2036.

In reality, it was this recent unipolar period that was historically anomalous. Starting from the end of World War II in 1945 and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has existed as the world’s sole hyperpower. For the first time in history, telecommunications and industry connected the whole world, enabling a truly global reach.

Prior to that point, multipolarity was the norm. Even during the height of the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago, there were other similarly powerful regions of the world, including the Han Dynasty and other Asian kingdoms and empires. That was at a time when distance truly mattered, and great powers could exist simultaneously with only limited contact.

The other side of this multipolar aspect of power was the multipolar nature of money. For thousands of years, it was gold and silver, along with lesser commodities, that served as money. There was no sovereign ledger big enough to serve the whole world, and so only nature’s decentralized ledger could suffice.

But in the age of telecommunications, as commerce and money began to flow at the speed of light in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even gold wasn’t good enough. The United States dollar became the primary currency for cross-border lending and contract pricing, while the United States treasury bond became the primary reserve asset for central banks. People often point to the existence of prior reserve currencies, such as the British pound sterling or the Dutch gilder, but they weren’t the same thing as the dollar. They were proxies for metal, and gold itself was the real reserve currency in those eras. But during this unipolar hyperpower era, the free-floating dollar and its bond market surpassed the known market capitalization of gold and became by far the largest holding in sovereign reserves.

Many people viewed this unipolar era as the end of history, even though of course history never does end. China and India gradually recovered their economic might from the depths of colonialism and war that defined their 19th and 20th centuries, with China in particular becoming the world’s largest steel producer, electricity generator, and manufacturer now in the early 21st century. The United States, meanwhile, suffered from the Triffin dilemma: in order to maintain the world’s reserve currency, the nation must supply the world with units of its currency, which they do by running deficits. Those deficits, and the associated hollowing-out of industry that they contribute to, is what eventually weakens the trust in that currency.

Now, many of those in power in the United States no longer want the costs of issuing the reserve currency, though few would say it out loud. The imbalances have become too great. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn’t want their assets to be devalued or frozen, or their liabilities hardened, at the whim of Washington DC. There are no other sovereign entities willing and able to serve as the world’s ledger either, with all the trust that’s required and all the burdens it entails.

And so, here it is that we witness the gradual trend shift back toward multipolarity of money. Gold is the obvious first choice; it’s the only other liquid and divisible store of value that’s big enough. It’s still not fast enough, but nations see that they didn’t have to go as all-in on the dollar as they did. They can hold gold in lieu of treasuries for a bigger chunk of their savings than they have been doing in recent decades. It may have its flaws, but gold can’t be hacked, can’t be unliterally debased or frozen, and lasts forever.

The second choice is a boring but obvious one: diversification. In a world where there are a handful of major economic powers, nations can diversify their fiat currency exposures. They can hold a plurality of currencies and bonds at roughly equal proportion to the size of their trading partners and capital providers. That spreads out risk, both in terms of debasement and in terms of confiscation. The problem here is about network effects: liquidity begets more liquidity, and entities don’t want assets and liabilities denominated in different units, and so money naturally trends toward one wherever possible. A patchwork combination of gold and two or three major fiat currencies collectively serving as the world’s ledger is a workable one, but not an ideal one.

The third potential choice, still in its relative infancy, is Bitcoin. Nature provided slow but decentralized ledgers, sovereigns provided fast but centralized ledgers, and this third method now provides a ledger that is both decentralized and fast. The hyperpower unipolar world occurred at a time when transaction speeds could move at the speed of light, but final settlement could not. Fast global transactions (i.e. IOUs) only require Morse code over telegraph connections, which are very simple and of low bandwidth, while fast global settlements (i.e. irreversible transfers) require much higher bandwidth communications and hard encryption. Now that fast settlement exists at scale, the reliance on central intermediaries to bridge the gap between fast transactions and slow settlements can be reduced.

However, the challenge from this point on is twofold: security and network effects.

Bitcoin’s ultimate security has been questioned from its inception. Will its economic incentives keep it permissionless and decentralized indefinitely, or will it eventually gravitate toward centralized capture? Will its cryptographic assumptions continue to hold? And related to both of those questions: will it be able to gradually update over time despite its decentralization, so that it can remain functional and secure as the world’s computer infrastructure evolves underneath it? At only seventeen years of age, these questions are still unanswered, but those of us who invest in the asset and participate in development either directly or through the financing of development believe that Bitcoin is the best shot we have, and so we try to create the reality we want to see.

Bitcoin’s network effects are strong, but are still limited. These network effects, along with its simple and robust design, have been sufficient to keep it as the largest cryptocurrency for seventeen straight years since inception, with no true competitors anywhere in sight. However, when looking more broadly, it’s still a minnow in an ocean of sharks. The direct user base is in the low millions, in a world of billions. The market cap is in the low trillions of dollars in a global world of assets that has reached roughly a quadrillion dollars. And speaking of dollars, people use the largest and most liquid money as their unit of account, and that remains the dollar globally and other fiat currencies locally. It’s what people’s paychecks are denominated in, it’s what their business contracts refer to, and it’s what fulfills their liabilities.

In order to grow very large, Bitcoin by definition requires upward volatility. With upward volatility comes euphoria and leverage, which create the conditions for periods of downward volatility. This volatile adoption period, which inevitably takes decades as it chips into the existing network effects of the dollar and other large monies, limits its attractiveness both as a unit of account and as a near-term savings device. It serves as an investable asset, as long-term savings, and as the most unstoppable payment and settlement method for products and services that are otherwise denominated in more stable incumbent monies. Bitcoin’s fate during this adoption period rests on the vision of early adopters whose plans are measured in decades. The larger it becomes, the more stable it can be and the more it can function as an accounting unit and near-term savings, but getting there is a long journey.

To the extent that Bitcoin continues to remain strong in the face of security threats, and continues to chip into the incumbent monetary networks, the more attractive it becomes to individuals, corporations, and sovereigns. In 2036, I believe gold will still be desired, as there is a natural tendency to want to own physical, immortal things. And I believe the largest fiat currencies, troubled as they may be, will still be in widespread use: those trains have quite a while to run yet. If it’s successful, Bitcoin in 2036 would be larger than any stock, and would rival the largest currencies and metals in market size.

The biggest challenge to Bitcoin is not governments, not quantum computers, not rogue developers, and not other digital assets. Instead, the biggest challenge, the biggest risk, is us. The people. All people.

In 2036, war, corruption, and tyranny will still exist. However, it’s a question of ratios and numbers. People imagine that governments impose all of these things on us, when in reality that’s only partially true. The way it works in practice is that people ask for it.

There is a perceived balance between liberty and security. War and tyranny, and the centralized ledgers that fuel them, come not just out of human evil, but also from human fear. When people are afraid of invaders, plagues, technology, and competition over scarce resources, they turn to their leaders for protection. They give up some of their liberty as long as they perceive that they’re under the collective security umbrella, and that the power of the state will be directed at others rather than themselves. This can work for a time, but it breeds corruption. Power begets power, and eventually turns inward. State failures, when they inevitably occur, must be covered up. Critics of the state, whether from without or from within, must be silenced. When liberty is gone, that system which promised security eventually and ironically becomes the biggest threat to it.

People who criticize ubiquitous surveillance and bureaucratic overreach when wielded by their political opponents often turn around to embrace those tools as soon as their political allies are in power. It’s a short-sighted strategy, relying either on staying in power forever, or in the lack of foresight about how those tools will be given back to their opponents at some point, stronger than ever and ready to be used against them yet again.

If Bitcoin fails to catch on by 2036, I think it will be because humanity didn’t want it, or wasn’t ready for it. The technology itself is robust. Proof of work helps keep the network secure. Tight limits on bandwidth and storage help keep the network decentralized. Layers built on top of it help provide scaling and privacy. There is more work to do, but the foundation is already strong, open for business, and being used at scale. To the extent that major challenges arise, the network is upgradable whenever sufficient consensus is achieved.

In this latest bull/bear cycle, Bitcoin further separated itself from other cryptocurrencies, but failed to attract many new users. AI services caught on with the public far more quickly, leapfrogging Bitcoin in adoption, because people and businesses could see AI’s immediate benefits to them, while Bitcoin’s benefits were unclear to many who haven’t gone down a rabbit hole of research.

There are many stores of value to choose from, and volatility is painful. In order for Bitcoin to truly catch on, it will need to be because people value financial sovereignty. It will need to be because hundreds of millions of people, not just several million as we have now, appreciate the importance of self-custodied savings, permissionless payments, and financial privacy. Those collectively are the attributes that Bitcoin uniquely provides at scale.

Prior to Bitcoin, during this century of fast transactions but without fast settlements, governments could impose their control over the financial system in the background. By regulating the banks, they could surveil and contain activities to a significant degree without restricting almost any end-user directly. Thus, most people didn’t see any direct threats to their financial liberty. After Bitcoin, people can run open-source code, can transact without permission, and can hold liquid savings in their own custody. To the extent that governments are threatened by this, they can’t just impose restrictions on thousands of banks anymore; they have to impose restrictions on millions of end-users and developers.

The question is, now that technology has pulled the mask off, will enough people resist and push forward through frictions, or will they comply without protest and move backward?

We have the tools now, but will we use them? That’s the main question to answer for 2036.

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

Gold has lost part of its old safe-haven image as its price action now moves closely with risk assets such as Bitcoin and the S&P 500, according to economist Robin Brooks.

Summary

Robin Brooks said gold has lost part of its safe-haven role as its equity correlation rises. Brooks said gold now trades more like Bitcoin and the S&P 500 during market stress. He linked gold’s changed behavior to retail inflows during the late 2025 debasement trade. Peter Schiff warned Bitcoin could face panic selling if it breaks its latest low. According to Brooks, gold no longer behaves like the traditional hedge investors once expected during periods of market stress. He said the metal now trades as a pro-cyclical, high-beta asset, with its correlation to the S&P 500 rising above 0.50 in recent months.

Gold’s safe-haven role comes under pressure Brooks said gold historically kept a correlation near zero with the S&P 500, while Bitcoin’s long-term correlation with equities usually stayed below 0.15. During the late 2025 and early 2026 “debasement trade,” Brooks said Bitcoin’s equity correlation climbed as high as 0.55.

The correlation of gold with the S&P 500 is now the same as bitcoin. It used to be that gold was uncorrelated with swings in risk appetite and in the S&P 500, but those days are over. These days gold trades like a high-beta asset. Safe haven no more…https://t.co/QFGBrFMbKS pic.twitter.com/Es1Ir2mO0M

— Robin Brooks (@robin_j_brooks) June 5, 2026 At the same time, gold’s correlation with U.S. equities also increased. Brooks said gold now matches Bitcoin’s correlation with the S&P 500, a setup he described as unusual for an asset long treated as a shelter during geopolitical or economic stress.

The economist said gold now falls with equities when investors reduce exposure to risk. In Brooks’ view, that behavior works against the basic purpose of a safe-haven asset.

Retail demand changed Gold’s market behavior Brooks linked the change to the sharp gold rally over the past year and the arrival of new retail buyers. He said the price increase mechanically lifted the value of gold on central bank balance sheets, but he rejected the idea that institutions had suddenly rushed into bullion or abandoned the U.S. dollar.

According to Brooks, heavy promotion of the “debasement trade” in late 2025 brought many retail investors into gold. He said these buyers tend to react more quickly to market stress than older bullion holders.

Brooks said he first expected the high equity correlation to fade after corrections pushed short-term traders out of the market. He now believes gold’s trading structure has changed more deeply.

Schiff warns Bitcoin could face another sell-off Meanwhile, Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff warned that the latest Bitcoin drop could lead to another round of panic selling. Schiff wrote on June 5 that Bitcoin had broken below $60,000 and touched its lowest level since October 2024.

Schiff said the move erased Bitcoin’s gains after Donald Trump’s November 2024 election win. According to Schiff, the rebound above $61,000 came from opportunistic buying rather than a durable recovery.

“If today’s low is taken out, prepare for a Crypto Black Monday,” Schiff said.

Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, has long argued that gold is a better store of value than Bitcoin. He also founded SchiffGold and became widely known after predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

Bitcoin broke $60K, taking out the low from Feb. 2025. At just below $59,750, Bitcoin was at its lowest since Oct. 2024, wiping out all of its post-Trump-election gains. Bottom fishers sent the price back above $61K. If today's low is taken out, prepare for a Crypto Black Monday.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) June 5, 2026 Standard Chartered keeps bullish Bitcoin view Standard Chartered offered a different view in a June 4 client note. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s head of digital assets research, called the latest crypto downturn a “painful week” but kept his long-term bullish outlook.

Kendrick said Strategy could restart heavy Bitcoin purchases, as it has done after past sales. He wrote that investors may later view this period as a buying zone if Bitcoin reaches $100,000 by the end of 2026.

The debate highlighted a stark split over whether volatility is a flaw or a feature of high-performing assets.

Peter Schiff insists that Bitcoin’s bubble has burst following its steep fall from an October 2025 all-time high of $126,000.

However, investor Anthony Pompliano defended the cryptocurrency’s long-term performance and argued that volatility is part of what has driven its returns.

Schiff Makes the Bear Case, Pompliano Leans on the Long Game The two faced off Monday evening on Fox Business in a live debate moderated by Liz Claman, where Schiff opened by claiming that BTC was a “digital nothing” and calling it a pyramid scheme in which early holders have been cashing out on the wave of demand generated by ETFs and Bitcoin treasury companies led by Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

“All the hype, all of the Bitcoin treasury companies, all of the ETFs, all that buying has simply allowed the people who got in early to cash out,” said Schiff to Claman.

According to him, those buying Bitcoin were only acting on the expectation that “somebody else is going to buy it at a higher price,” an approach he contrasted with gold, which he described as a physical asset with industrial and monetary use.

The economist also claimed that the OG crypto has “no real long-term,” arguing that it was barely higher than where it was five years ago, and framed that sideways drift as evidence of a market that was running on fumes rather than real demand. Gold, on the other hand, in Schiff’s estimation, is in a longer-term bull market, with the analyst suggesting that its recent pullback from $2,600 was due to a classic “buy the rumor, sell the fact” move after an overextended run linked to geopolitical risk pricing.

However, Pompliano, wearing a gold tie in a pointed nod to Schiff, pushed back on that framing and pointed out that Bitcoin’s 10-year compound annual growth rate of around 55% to 60% was several times bigger than gold’s, which, according to him, stands at approximately 12%. The ProCap CEO also said that volatility wasn’t unique to BTC and should not be thought of as a flaw, as it is a characteristic shared by high-performing assets.

“One of the misconceptions about volatility is that volatility is bad,” Pompliano noted. “But actually what we find is the best returning stocks, the best returning commodities, they are all highly volatile.”

On Strategy and Political Concerns Of course, a Schiff BTC debate wouldn’t have been complete without throwing shade at Strategy, and the gold bug did not disappoint. He claimed executive chairman Saylor was “sacrificing his own shareholders by destroying value” with the firm’s financial model moving from issuing stocks at premiums to selling shares at discounts and using leverage tools to continue buying Bitcoin.

You may also like: Brutal Bitcoin Liquidation Cascade Imminent Below $59K, Warns Analyst Mining Profits Dry Up Across Bitcoin, DOGE, LTC, and BCH Saylor Should Stop Buying Bitcoin, Says CryptoQuant The company did sell a small amount of Bitcoin recently but returned with a 1,587 BTC buy on June 15, worth $100 million, that took its holdings to 846,842. According to Schiff, the fact that Strategy sold some of its BTC, however small the number, suggests there’s a strain in what he described as its “flywheel” model of perpetual accumulation.

One area of partial agreement between Pompliano and Schiff was political. Pompliano acknowledged that the Trump administration’s backing of crypto represents politicians latching onto donor money rather than principled support, while Schiff was even blunter, calling government involvement in Bitcoin “a serious problem” and describing it as a deliberate misdirection of resources.

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Monero Jumps 27% in a Suspected $120 Million Laundering Run: Too Loud to Hide?

Posted: January 29, 2020

Litecoin creator, Charlie Lee has been vocal about LTC becoming a privacy coin in the near future. Lee had on-boarded Grin developer, David Burkett to implement the MimbleWimble [MW] protocol and use extension blocks for scalability and privacy on the network. Noting fungibility as one of the important properties of money that had been missing from Litecoin, Lee said in a recent interview that the implementation of MW protocol might get them halfway there.

Burkett, who had been working on developing the extended MW block announced to the community that the project began on 29 December 2019. Lee added that the integration of MW protocol will be introduced as a soft-fork. Scalability has been the main concern for most coins on the blockchain, but according to the LTC creator, MW scales better than Bitcoin.

Lee said:

“So nice thing about MimbleWimble is that it scales really well.”

Claiming that the protocol does not sacrifice its scalability to provide privacy and fungibility, he added:

“In some sense, it actually scales better than Bitcoin [and] Litecoin today because of the ability to do compact transactions, to throw away inputs and outputs, the way it’s designed is actually very good for scalability and it’s quite impressive how it works.”

Burkett had informed the community about his plans to restructure the core logic to be shared between Grin++ and Litecoin, including logging, serialization, crypto, error handling, and common data structures. The developers’ further plans for Litecoin in the new year included determining building methods, defining all LTC models, and moving the database implementation over to libmw-core which is the partial redesign of Grin++.

Posted: February 12, 2020

Though Bitcoin is quite heavily misadvertised as an anonymous payment network, it is actually one of the more transparent crypto-networks to transact on. In the early days of cryptocurrency, when KYC and AML regulations weren’t as strict as they are now, it was easier to conduct Bitcoin transactions which couldn’t be traced back to criminal activities or malicious intent. Today, while Bitcoin isn’t used as much for private transactions, multitudes of privacy coins like Monero and Dash have stepped in to fill the void.

Monero, specifically, has regulators worried due to its ability to make transactions almost impossible to trace. In recent years, extensive research has been conducted into the traceability of such privacy coins and so far, no unexacting methods of monitoring their transactions have come to light, with usage only rising.

According to TokenInsight’s annual market report, Monero was the most widely used privacy coin in 2019. Further, Monero’s dominance rose from 35% to 50% over the year and combined with Zcash and Dash, represented 90% of the privacy coin market capitalization.

2019 also saw the launch of two privacy coins utilizing the MimbleWimble protocol — Grin and Beam, both of which saw increases to their market caps over the year. However, classic privacy coins like PIVX and NavCoin continued to decline.

Interestingly, for both Grin and Monero, the top two mining pools represented more than 50% of the networks’ hashrates.

With privacy coins being increasingly looked at as vehicles to launder money, it seems unlikely that restrictions around their use and sale will loosen in the foreseeable future. And while these cryptocurrencies do have other use-cases such as confidential business transactions and financial data protection, it seems unlikely that regulators will relax their stance on anonymous transfers of value.

Last year, Monero was delisted from several cryptocurrency exchanges due to its alleged violation of the FATF’s ‘travel rule.’ With so many restrictions being placed on these coins, their future might be bleaker than previously thought.

However, popular cryptocurrencies are seeing developments being made towards providing optional privacy for transactions on their networks. 

Litecoin has already begun the development of an implementation of MimbleWimble extension blocks, while Ethereum is working on using zero-knowledge proofs to include the ability to conduct private transactions on the blockchain.

In this regard, even though privacy coins might continue to receive increased scrutiny from regulators and policymakers, anonymous transactions might become more popular than previously thought.

HodlX Guest Post  Submit Your Post   A core ideology in the cryptocurrency space is a consistent commitment to privacy. But until privacy coins deliver easy-to-use, efficient solutions at scale, privacy will remain a privilege reserved for the crypto-savvy.

For individuals seeking to reject government or other third-party surveillance in their financial and business dealings, end-to-end encryption is a must. However, privacy coins universally lack a comprehensive approach that can aid users in performing other necessary functions like private messaging, file sharing, and data messaging.

Monero is routinely seen as the gold standard of the privacy niche, and for good reason. It’s the longest running of the major contenders, boasts the largest market cap, and has successfully protected XMR transactions from unwanted eyes for years. But that hasn’t stopped Monero users from being identified and reprimanded, over and over again.

Now, the purpose is not to condone criminal behavior, or argue over what constitutes a crime – criminals should be arrested. But the fact that individuals using Monero for illicit purposes are routinely uncovered and detained suggests that XMR isn’t adequately serving its users. By tracking on-ramps in and out of Monero, channels of communication, web activity, and so on, Monero users can forfeit their anonymity even if they use the coin exactly as intended.

The recent Monero website hack, in which a malicious actor planted a coin stealer on the site, proves that anyone can be tampered with, despite how knowledgeable they are of crypto. Centralized solutions in use alongside Monero and other privacy coins aren’t perfect, as the massive, recent NordVPN hack highlights.

And if we take a step further back, how accessible is Monero itself to the average individual? Despite over a decade of existence, cryptocurrency across the board is incredibly inaccessible for the average individual. XMR and coins like it carry an even larger learning curve. Realistically, what percentage of the population is equipped to properly utilize Monero and supplementary services to adequately protect their anonymity? I’d argue the figure is well below 1%. And with the ongoing trend of exchanges delisting the “purely privacy” coins, that figure may continue to dip lower still.

For privacy coins to carry out their intended purpose, they need to build out comprehensive, user-friendly applications that average Joe can wrap his head around.

Opal Coin: Before Its Time

A holistic approach to privacy isn’t a foreign concept to the niche. Once upon a time, there was a little known privacy coin by the name of Opal. Launched in 2014, Opal was situated as a suite of privacy utilities that were all housed in the Opal wallet. Alongside hidden addresses and shielded transactions typical of most privacy coins, you could also partake in on-chain private messaging. From a single location, you could negotiate dealings and settle transactions in a completely decentralized, secure manner.

Unfortunately, this philosophy wasn’t widely regarded as necessary for the privacy space. Although there were other intended features to encompass within the wallet, development largely dried up within the next year as the team and community pursued different ventures. For all intents and purposes, Opal and “holistic privacy” were good as dead.

Broadening Utility

Either in response to Monero, or as a reflection of the growth of the industry as a whole, there are a number of competing privacy coins that do emphasize greater utillity. Zcash is perhaps the most appropriate example. Like Monero, Zcash is sufficiently private for users looking to deal in encrypted currency transactions.

However, Zcash broadens the scope of its “transactions” through the incorporation of private smart contracts. Smart contracts are the industry standard for the nuanced transaction of data on-chain. When applied to a privacy coin, this means users can deal in much more than just units of currency: they can store files, lock currency, establish escrow, alongside more nuanced potential applications like decentralized autonomous organizations.

Zcash also employs “flexible privacy”. Users can opt for public transactions, which may be necessary for auditing and compliance purposes. They can similarly verify activity through zk-SNARKs without revealing contents. In order for privacy coins to see legitimate usage at the global scale, they must encompass these broader functionalities.

Overcoming the Impossible Trinity

There is currently an “impossible trinity” of utility, sufficient privacy, and scalability that privacy coins across the boards are succumbing to. Most projects are building out under the preconceived notion that only two of these qualities can be appeased.

Monero is sufficiently private and scales well enough, but lacks utility for more comprehensive use per the possibilities suggested above. Grin has taken the same approach. Verge is quick and offers several features, but does so at the sacrifice of the adequacy of the privacy it encompasses. Zcash is pushing towards utility, and many will agree ZEC is sufficiently private, but the resources required for various privacy activities, like contracts, suggests the network won’t succeed at worldwide scale.

Enigma is one project looking to overcome this “impossible trinity” at the application layer. The functionality of Enigma reflects the ability to use “secret contracts” across existing blockchain networks. In essence, this will allow users to transmit and interact with data on-chain in a secure, untraceable manner.

Essentially, Enigma is providing the “privacy” for networks that otherwise embody utility and scalability. As major chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin continue to improve and evolve, the impact Engima enables as its underlying chains become more capable similarly grows.

At the protocol level, Beam is also taking on a more comprehensive approach. Like Grin, Beam is constricted by its MimbleWimble architecture, which confines network activity as solely currency transactions. Unlike Grin, however, Beam has placed ample resources and capital to broaden the utility and usability of the project.

While Grin continues to be very barebones, with users relying on a spartan command line wallet, Beam is putting a major emphasis on usability. They’ve built interactive wallets on a number of platforms, and atomic swap capabilities provide users more autonomy in bringing funds on-and-off Beam, without as much reliance on exchange offerings. Additional features like tokenized assets in the pipeline, combined with interoperability initiatives, further expand the utility of the coin.

Lastly, a newer contender, Stegos, has an ambitious bottom-up approach that may prove fruitful for the broader niche. Like Grin and Beam, Stegos utilizes aggressive transaction pruning for a far more lightweight, scalable blockchain. But beyond that, Stegos approach is a direct opposite: instead of completely restricting the functionality of transactions, Stegos expands network activity to broaden transactions as a system for fast data messaging.

In the same capacity that an amount of tokens can be sent, users can similarly send messages, like Opal, alongside media, data, and whatever else. The team is looking to create a one-stop mobile app that will allow users to participate in encrypted, on-chain messaging, and interact with network dapps. This is only possible because the network is lightweight enough for smartphones to act as full nodes, which enables them to whichever functionalities are available for desktop alternatives.

An Innovative Future

The above coins, along with other initiatives that make up the privacy players of the current generation of “blockchain 3.0”, suggest that the usability solution in the niche is a matter of “when,” rather than “if”. The future should be private. Down the road, everyone will be able to maintain complete digital anonymity through the utilization of privacy coins.

How far out we are will only be revealed with time. All will depend on when projects across the board shift their approach to focusing on how to build a platform that can do it all properly. The current philosophy of figuring out the best way to do what is possible through existing infrastructure is a fruitless endeavor.

 

In brief Tim Draper gains 40% on his Aragon investment in just one month. Draper's top picks include Tezos, Bancor, Maker, ANT, Spacecash, Grin, AXE. He hopes Aragon's judicial system will be a game-changer in the legal sector. Last month, venture capitalist and Bitcoin evangelist Tim Draper bought one million Aragon (ANT) for $1 million. This was at a price of $1 per coin—even though the coin was worth $0.70 at the time.

Now the coin’s price has shot up to $1.40, netting him a 40% return in just weeks—at least on paper. He would be hard pressed to sell so many coins given the token’s low trading volume. But, either way, Draper isn’t planning on selling.

“I bought for a reason. I want to drive more usage of decentralized government services. I have no interest in selling,” he told Decrypt.

Draper wants to take partThe Aragon platform provides the tools to create decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). At present, the project has facilitated the creation of over 1,000 DAOs since launching in 2018.

Draper now controls a hefty sum of ANT’s total supply—2.5% to be precise. As a result, the crypto entrepreneur not only sits on Aragon’s advisory board but can also participate in its forthcoming judicial system.

“I like their model of creating a totally decentralized judicial system. Draper told Decrypt. “This is much needed. Eventually, this will be a big time saver and money saver from the runaway lawyer system we currently have.”

At present, the project team is focused on its newly devised Aragon court—a digital judicial system for DAOs within the project’s governance.

ANT—Aragon’s native cryptocurrency—is utilized within Aragon’s network governance. Holders of ANT will use their tokens to participate in forthcoming court proceedings. The first of which, came into session back on February 10, involving the mock trial of Ethereum classic developer Yaz Khoury.

Tim Draper is no stranger to significant crypto investments. He’s cited as one of the earliest investors in Bitcoin, snapping up nearly 30,000 BTC at a U.S marshalls auction back in 2014. The auctioneered BTC was worth $632 apiece at the time—a fortune presently valued at over $262 million.

“Of course you know I am a big Bitcoin supporter. I like all the coins that still have a team working hard to make them succeed. Tezos, Bancor, Maker, ANT, Spacecash, Grin, AXE, all have teams dedicated to them making them grow and succeed,” he explained.

Let’s hope none of them get the AXE.

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Jameson Lopp: For Me Bitcoin Is a Hedge Against the Existing System0

What makes good money in the Information Age? The quality of a monetary product is primarily attributable to it being (1) recognizable, (2) scarce, (3) censorship-resistant, (4) durable & indestructible, (5) extensible, (6) salable, (7) portable, (8) fungible, (9) private and (10) divisible.

The greatest disruptive innovation in monetary history was published on October 31, 2008 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System which outlined a tamper-proof, decentralized peer-to-peer protocol that could track and verify digital transactions, prevent double-spending and generate a transparent record for anyone to inspect in nearly real-time.

As shown with Bitcoin over the past decade the market takes a monetary product as it currently is along with speculation of what it may become instead of what it was.

It took approximately eight years before a similar disruptive monetary innovation was published when the pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor placed the original MimbleWimble white paper on a Bitcoin research channel and then disappeared.

In the 49 page formal math proof published in 2018 titled Aggregate Cash System: A Cryptographic Investigation of Mimblewimble [https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1039.pdf], Fuchsbauer, et. al. concluded, “In this paper, we provide a provable-security analysis for Mimblewimble. We give a precise syntax and formal security definitions for an abstraction of Mimblewimble that we call an aggregate cash system. We then formally prove the security of Mimblewimble in this definitional framework. Our results imply in particular that two natural instantiations (with Pedersen commitments and Schnorr or BLS signatures) are provably secure against inflation and coin theft under standard assumptions.”

A Mimblewimble based coin enables greater network scalability, privacy and fungibility than legacy blockchain protocols. All transactions on the base layer use CoinJoin with Confidential Transactions and signature aggregation. Whale alerts are not even possible with extremely scalable ghost money. But as with everything there are trade-offs in fundamental characteristics that each monetary product must make.

In a 2016 podcast Bitcoin core developer Peter Wuille stated,

“Introducing Mimblewimble into Bitcoin in a backwards-compatible way would be a difficult exercise. It may not be impossible, but it would be hard. I think the way if people were experimenting with this, I would expect it to be an experimental separate chain or sidechain. In a sidechain we would not introduce a new cryptocurrency but it would be a separate chain. There are some downsides to Mimblewimble. In particular, it does not have a scripting language…a scripting language is very neat to play with, but it has a privacy downside. Mimblewimble takes this to the other side where you have very good privacy but at the expense of no other features any more.”

Fortunately, there has been significant research done since then and with Mimblewimble these types of scripts and applications are possible: Multi-Signature transactions, time locks, atomic swaps, and hashed time-locked contracts which are the building block of payment channels and Lightning Network.

In January 2019 GRIN and BEAM both launched to extreme anticipation as Mimblewimble base layer coins. However, both have extremely low stock to flow ratios and GRIN does not have a supply cap.

On January 18. 2019, before GRIN launched a developer opened an issue on Github about GRIN’s emission rate and supply cap but was summarily dismissed. Because of GRIN’s lack of interest in a supply cap the developer interpreted that as a green light to experiment with a sounder monetary policy.

In February 2019 MWC was announced as a fork of GRIN. The initial stock of both BEAM and GRIN were created by mining which was highly inflationary. For software development funding, GRIN relies on donations and BEAM allocates part of the block reward to a foundation.

In October 2019 a Bitcoin and MWC atomic swap was completed on testnet.

In November 2019 MWC mainnet launched as an experimental separate chain and has functioned flawlessly according to the consensus rules ever since. The consensus rules provide for a total of 20,000,000 MWC. 10,000,000 will be proof of work mined and the initial stock of 10,000,000 were created in the genesis block.

The MWC initial stock was distributed differently than either GRIN or BEAM by using these three ways: (1) 2,000,000 to the developers for software development work immediately after the genesis block was mined; (2) 6,000,000 about a month after mainnet launched via an airdrop program that has primarily gone to the most grizzled and sophisticated veterans in the crypto-industry: Bitcoin holders who registered with more than 148,000 BTC at the bottom of the bear market between April and July 2019. Some were unclaimed and will either be burned, airdropped or added to the HODL program; and (3) 2,000,000 will be distributed over the infancy years of the project via a HODL program to those who continue to hold MWC. Registration is functional and over 6.7m of 8m MWC are registered. Registered MWC are still fully liquid and can be moved at the user’s discretion.

The MWC developers have stated in the Roadmap, “There are many potential places development resources can be allocated and they will be chosen based on market needs with highest priority given to requests that will primarily benefit and come from the buyers and hodlers of last resort.”

Just because a new monetary product is created does not mean that the market ascribes it any value. Such was the case from January 3, 2009 to January 2011 where Bitcoin traded at less than $0.25.

And such was the case on December 2, 2019 when the MWC airdrop began to be distributed. On December 3rd MWC hit an all-time low of about $0.25 or a market cap of less than $2m.

Bitcoin has clawed its market cap from nothing. Likewise, MWC was nearly worthless, nevertheless, a heartbeat was detected and the speculation network effect started. Some people have started to acquire and hold MWC just in case it might catch on. It seems that fundamentally good products always do eventually.

The MWC difficulty algorithm is based on pure proof of work. Inherited from GRIN was the use of C29 and C31 and, in the future, C32 and C33. Under the consensus rules C29 is scheduled to phase out around November 2019 at a rate of 1% per week. Pure proof of work, which the MWC team considers a superior form of security compared to alternatives like proof of stake, requires a tradeoff between emission rate and security.

As MWC’s price began firming the decision was made unanimously by all interested stakeholders to hard fork MWC, remove the C32 and C33 parts of the consensus code and rapidly harden the MWC emission rate. This would leave MWC the sole coin on the C31 algorithm.

An algorithm for which there is an ASIC designed but not put into production. On January 17, 2020 Innosilicon announced,

“We are sorry to inform you that our Grin product G32 GPU ASIC fabrication has not been supported well by the foundry… so we have to put this production on hold till future clearance. Innosilicon invested huge amount of R&D dollars to complete the innovative CC31/CC32 Grin GPU ASIC design to our satisfaction because we believe in Grin and its core team.”

On March 31, 2019 the MWC hard fork went flawlessly and on April 7, 2019 the emission rate decreased by approximately 75%. The stock-to-flow changed from 6.4 to 25.7. By February 2021 the MWC stock-to-flow will be over 62.

Although still in its infancy, MWC has been consistently trading above a $100m market cap with a monthly mining emission of around $500,000. By market capitalization, this makes MWC the #3 privacy coin behind Monero and Zcash and in the top-15 proof of work coins around Ravencoin and Decred. But in nominal numbers, MWC is minuscule compared to Bitcoin’s $90m of weekly emissions.

MWC is designed to be extremely complementary to Bitcoin and atomic swaps will only strengthen that relationship. Bitcoin can function as an extremely effective monetary VPN.

There seems to be significant information asymmetry regarding Mimblewimble and even the existence of MWC . As a result, it will be very interesting to see how the market responds to this six-month-old monetary product. When performing economic calculation the profits will go to those who calculate correctly and the losses to those who calculate incorrectly. The order book will be the arbiter of opinions.

After all, in an era of pandemic lockdowns, infinite bailouts, rising inflation, draconian wealth taxes and other financial, political and geo-political turmoil it just might be that the market is interested in a monetary product that delivers on being extremely scarce scalable ghost money.

PANews reported on September 19th that, according to SoSoValue data, the crypto market saw three consecutive days of gains. The GameFi sector saw a 24-hour gain of 5.45%. Within the sector, ImmutableX (IMX) surged 26.32%, while GALA and Beam (BEAM) rose 3.74% and 9.14%, respectively. Additionally, Bitcoin (BTC) rose 0.37%, breaking through $117,000, while Ethereum (ETH) fell 0.40%, fluctuating in a narrow range around $4,600.

Other sectors with outstanding performance include: the Layer2 sector rose 4.71% in 24 hours. Within the sector, Optimism (OP) and Mantle (MNT) rose 3.93% and 6.33% respectively; the NFT sector rose 2.35%, and Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) rose 3.42%; the DeFi sector rose 1.31%, and Chainlink (LINK) rose 3.25%; the Layer1 sector rose 0.70%, and Avalanche (AVAX) rose 9.14%.

In other sectors, the PayFi sector fell 0.20%, but Trust Wallet (TWT) rose against the trend by 19.13%; the CeFi sector fell 0.30%, and ApolloX (APX) rose 30.73%; the Meme sector fell 1.43%, and Pump.fun (PUMP) and MemeCore (M), which had previously risen significantly, fell 10.80% and 12.06% respectively.

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As the broader crypto market consolidates, one industry analyst has identified a select group of altcoins that could see exponential gains during the anticipated “super-cycle” expected in the latter half of 2024. In a detailed social media post, the analyst, known as OxNobler, delves into the cyclical nature of the crypto market and highlights the factors driving the impending uptrend phase.

Crypto ‘Supercycle’ Imminent? According to OxNobler, the crypto market consistently follows a four-phase cycle: Accumulation, Markup (Uptrend), Distribution, and Markdown (Downtrend). The analyst argues that understanding these distinct phases is crucial for investors seeking to capitalize on low cap altcoins and market trends to maximize their returns.

“We are currently on the brink of entering the Uptrend phase, which is set to be fueled by a confluence of factors, including the upcoming US election, potential rate cuts, the global adoption of crypto ETFs, continued technological advancements, and shifts in China’s regulatory landscape,” explains OxNobler.

Drawing on this market insight, the analyst has curated a list of six altcoins that are poised to experience substantial growth during the anticipated crypto super-cycle. 

These tokens span a diverse range of sectors, including artificial intelligence (AI), decentralized finance (DeFi), real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and more.

6 Low-Cap Altcoins Tipped To Skyrocket First on the list is Numerai (NRM), an Ethereum-based platform that allows developers and data scientists to experiment with and create more reliable machine learning models. 

With a current price of $11.75 and a market capitalization of $86 million, the analyst believes Numerai’s positioning in the trending AI sector makes it a compelling investment opportunity.

Another altcoin highlighted is TokenFi (TOKEN), a crypto and RWA tokenization platform aiming to simplify the tokenization process and emerge as a leading player in the space. Currently trading at $0.06 with a $60 million market cap, TokenFi’s role in bridging the gap between traditional and decentralized finance is seen as a key growth driver.

Ravencoin (RVN), an open-source proof-of-work blockchain enabling the issuance and control of utility tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other digital assets, also makes the list. 

With a market price of $0.015 and a $223 million market capitalization, Ravencoin’s positioning in the growing DeFi sector adds to its potential upside.

The Fluence Project, with its native token FLT currently valued at $0.27, is another intriguing prospect. As the first decentralized “Cloudless” computing platform, Fluence aims to provide an open alternative to the dominant cloud computing giants, aligning with the analyst’s bullish outlook on the AI sector.

Realio Network (RIO), an end-to-end blockchain-based platform for the issuance, investment, and management of digital securities and crypto assets, is also included. Trading at $0.89 with a modest $5 million market cap, Realio Network’s focus on the RWA tokenization space is seen as a notable bullish catalyst for the analyst.

Last on the list, is the largest altcoin among the six by market cap, Pendle (PENDLE), a protocol enabling the tokenization and trading of future yield, rounds out the list. Currently priced at $2.63 with a market capitalization of $419 million, Pendle’s positioning in the DeFi sector aligns with the analyst’s broader thesis.

The daily chart shows PENDLE’s price downtrend experienced over the last months. Source: PENDLEUSDT on TradingView.com Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView.com

Can you mine Bitcoin with a gaming PC? Here’s what you need to know

Ravencoin, a Bitcoin clone, formed a God candle on Thursday, June 5, soaring to its highest point since December. 

Ravencoin (RVN) jumped to a high of $0.027, up 155% from its opening price and 210% from its lowest level in April. It then pulled back and settled at $0.016, giving it a market cap of $255 million.

Ravencoin’s price spike followed its listing on Upbit, the largest South Korean crypto exchange. This listing triggered a surge in interest from South Korean traders, who can now buy the token using their local currency.

CoinMarketCap data shows that most of Ravencoin’s trading volume occurred on Upbit. Its daily volume spiked to $445 million, with Upbit accounting for $170 million of that total.

Ravencoin’s rally mirrored the performance of other cryptocurrencies after their Upbit listings. For example, Orca (ORCA) price surged by over 200%, while Arkham and Kaito rose 55% and 25%, respectively, following their listings. Most recently, tokens like Livepeer and Pocket Network also posted sharp gains after being listed.

This pattern stems from South Korea’s significance in the crypto market. A report from February showed that the country ranks as the third most active market after the United States and China, with average daily trading volume across South Korean exchanges climbing to $12 billion.

However, these post-listing pumps often prove short-lived. Orca, for instance, jumped to $5.57 after its listing, only to plunge 70% to $1.698 within days. Similarly, Pocket Network rallied to $0.0898 last week but has since dropped 41% to $0.052.

Ravencoin is a Bitcoin (BTC) fork optimized for lower transaction costs and faster speeds. One key difference is its supply cap: Ravencoin has a maximum supply of 21 billion coins, compared to Bitcoin’s 21 million.

Ravencoin price analysis RVN price chart | Source: crypto.news The daily chart shows that RVN bottomed at $0.008977 in April and then moved within an ascending channel. It dipped to the lower boundary of this channel earlier this week before forming a God candle following the Upbit listing. The price initially surged to $0.02573 before easing to $0.0166 as hype around the listing faded.

Ravencoin remains above both the 50-day and 100-day moving averages, as well as the upper side of the ascending channel. Therefore, the most likely scenario is a continued pullback, potentially to $0.0125, its lowest swing point from August of last year. Such a move would imply a 25% decline from current levels.

Bitcoin and top altcoins like Venice Token, Kaia, Ravencoin, Fartcoin, and SPX6900 rose on Monday as U.S.-China trade talks got underway.

Bitcoin (BTC) climbed to $108,000, its highest level since May 29, marking a 7.55% gain from its monthly low. Venice Token (VVV) rose to $3.52, sharply up from this month’s low of $2.56.

Similarly, Kaia (KAIA), Ravencoin (RVN), Fartcoin (FARTCOIN), and SPX6900 (SPX) jumped by over 10% on Monday. This surge brought the market capitalization of all coins to over $3.35 trillion.

The likely catalyst was the easing of trade tensions between the United States and China, with negotiations beginning in London on Monday afternoon. Talks are expected to extend into Tuesday.

Markets are hopeful that the two sides will reach an agreement to ease export controls and possibly reduce tariffs. Such an outcome would likely temper investor fears that have lingered for months amid escalating trade restrictions.

Bitcoin and altcoins rose as accumulation continued. Strategy bought 1,045 coins worth $110 million last week, bringing its total holdings to 582,000 coins worth over $62 billion. Other companies like Trump Media, MetaPlanet, and GameStop have continued buying Bitcoin.

This wave of accumulation has pushed the amount of Bitcoin held on exchanges down to 1.18 million, compared to 1.57 million on January 1. Declining exchange balances are typically viewed as bullish, indicating that investors are moving assets into self-custody for long-term holding.

Bitcoin supply on exchanges | Source: Santiment Bitcoin also jumped after some bullish statements from top players in finance. Cathie Wood believes that Bitcoin price could jump 15x from here in the next five years. FundStrat’s Tom Lee also believes that the coin will end the year at between $200,000 and $300,000 this year.

Bitcoin price cup and handle pattern activates BTC price chart | Source: crypto.news Further, Bitcoin and other altcoins rose as Bitcoin’s cup-and-handle pattern activated. As the chart above shows, it has moved above the upper side of the descending channel, pointing to an eventual surge to $142,000, as we predicted here. Altcoins do well when Bitcoin is in a strong rally.

In this patch of your weekly Dispatch:Nexo grows Q1 loan bookDe-escalation trade cappedBTC implied vol stays compressedMarket cast

BTC: weekly and daily indicators offer no directional biasOn the weekly chart, price is holding marginally above the 20-period SMA, leaving the longer-term trend intact but unconvincing. RSI is neutral, offering no momentum bias. Stochastic has rolled out of overbought, easing the buy-side pressure built up at recent highs. The MACD histogram remains positive, so bullish momentum is still in place. ADX is declining, indicating that trend strength is weakening regardless of direction.

On the daily chart, we see the same setup in compressed form. RSI and Stochastic are flat and neither gives a directional cue. The MACD histogram sits marginally below zero, a mild bearish tilt rather than an outright sell signal. ADX is at low levels, the standard reading for a range-bound tape.

Key levels to watch. On the downside, immediate support sits around $75,500, with the next zone at $70,000–$71,000. The weekly 20-period SMA may also act as dynamic support. On the upside, immediate resistance is around $78,000–$79,000, with the next zone at $82,000.

The big idea

Bitcoin's reserve and credit layers come into viewMay has been a bumpy de-escalation trade. Bitcoin's range has held through it, but on a discretionary bid that remains macro- and sentiment-sensitive. Two events last week point to a structural shift in that base: a reserve layer that takes supply off the float, and a credit market mature enough that long-duration holders don't have to sell into stress.

Market context. BTC is up 0.5% month-to-date through May 23, with realized volatility at 28% annualized,  the third-lowest May reading since 2011. The range held through the worst weekly ETF outflow since January, a hot April CPI print on May 12, and Mark Cuban's public exit. Strategy's $2.01 billion purchase last week largely offset a simultaneous $1 + billion ETF outflow. But on May 5, Saylor signaled Strategy may sell Bitcoin to fund STRC dividend obligations — the first such signal since 2020, and a reminder that even the closest thing to an unconditional buyer is conditional.The reserve layer (ARMA). Underneath, however, the structural layer is being built. On May 21, Representatives Begich and Golden introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA) with 17 co-sponsors. If passed, it would consolidate existing federal Bitcoin holdings (1.0% to 1.6% of total supply) under Treasury custody, mandate a 20-year hold, and direct a study on budget-neutral acquisition strategies. Notably, by codifying reserve status in law rather than executive order, ARMA lowers the political risk of reversal and raises Bitcoin's credibility as a reserve asset for other sovereigns weighing their own exposure. The marginal sovereign bid that follows would build slowly, on a horizon longer than any allocator cycle.The credit layer. The crypto credit market has matured, consolidating around quality operators after October's liquidation event. Nexo cements its place at the center of that consolidation. Per Galaxy Research's Q1 2026 leverage report, Nexo was one of only four CeFi lenders to grow its loanbook, while the broader CeFi market contracted. Nexo is among the three largest lenders globally with a 7.02% market share across tracked CeFi lending. The maturing credit layer means long-duration holders can actively manage exposure through weakness without being forced to sell.The gold parallel. Central banks hold around 38,666 tonnes of gold — about 18% of all above-ground supply (World Gold Council). Those reserves turn over slowly. ARMA is the first credible legislative path to an equivalent structure for Bitcoin. A mature lending market against those reserves is the second piece of the same architecture. The throughline: Bitcoin's bid is shifting from buyers who can change their minds to holders who won't sell,  and a mature  credit market that means they don't need to.

TradFi trends

One hedge for all Bitcoin ETFs The SEC approved a new Bitcoin options product on May 22, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker QBTC — the first U.S. securities-exchange options contract that references the Bitcoin spot price directly. Existing IBIT and FBTC options track a single fund. Cboe's CBTX, listed since December 2024, broadens that to an index of spot Bitcoin ETFs. QBTC goes a step further, referencing an index built from order-book data at eight crypto exchanges — no fund layer in between. It clears in the same brokerage account and uses the same margin rules as S&P 500 index options, so TradFi institutions can hedge Bitcoin the way they already hedge equities. Trading begins once the CFTC signs off and the OCC updates its disclosure document, expected in the second half of 2026.

Macroeconomic roundup

De-escalation meets rates reality The de-escalation trade returned last week but was capped by hawkish central banks. Brent fell from above $110 to $105.5 on Iran negotiation headlines, and U.S. equities recovered most of the geopolitical risk premium. Bond yields moved the other way. The U.S. 10-year closed near 4.6%, with the 30-year touching its highest level since July 2007. The April 28–29 FOMC minutes ran more hawkish than the statement implied. Many participants would have preferred to drop the bias language outright, citing upside inflation risks from oil, tariffs and Middle East tensions. The majority signaled that further firming would likely become appropriate if inflation persists above 2%, with some discussion that the next move could be a hike rather than a cut.

The yield move was not uniform across regions: 

The 10-year U.S.-Bund spread reached 150 basis points, its widest since August 2025. Both the ECB and the U.S. Fed are hawkish but the macro backdrop is diverging. The U.S. is dealing with sticky inflation against resilient growth, Europe with sticky inflation against cracking growth. The flash eurozone composite PMI fell to 47.5 in May, a 31-month low, leaving the ECB hiking into a slowdown.The week's most interesting data story

BTC implied volatility remains at historically low levelsBitcoin implied volatility continues to compress as BTC stabilizes in the upper $70,000s after recovering from its early-February low near $63,000. The term structure, inverted through February and March, has normalized. As of May 21, 1-week ATM IV sits at 29.3%, 1-month at 34.4%, 3-month at 37.3%, and 6-month at 40.7% — all within a few points of their respective 15-month lows. Traders are pricing in relative calm despite persistent macro uncertainty and a still-fragile market structure. Historically, prolonged periods of suppressed Bitcoin volatility rarely last; compression regimes tend to precede significant directional moves, particularly when spot stabilizes after large drawdowns.

The numbers

The week’s most interesting numbers5.2% — U.S. 30-year treasury yields hit a 19-year peak last week, marking a major bond market selloff, driven by escalating inflation fears.

32.7% — Bitcoin's 1-month implied volatility compressed in May, hitting its lowest level since September 2025. 

$230 million — combined net inflows into spot SOL and XRP ETFs over the first 16 trading days of May 2026, with neither product registering a single outflow day. 

65.2%— the share of all EUR stablecoins hosted on Ethereum.

Hot topic

What the community is discussinghttps://x.com/_10delta_/status/2058551705051058277

AI and utility driven infra will lead the next leg higher, they say.

https://x.com/eliant_capital/status/2058546044334432607

Goldman's sentiment gauge suggests positioning is not yet stretched or euphoric.

https://x.com/MarylandHODL21/status/2058981918108991893

Yield curve control plus money printing will drive capital out of dollars into alternative stores of value.

Dispatch is a weekly publication by Nexo, designed to help you navigate and take action in the evolving world of digital assets. To share your Dispatch suggestions and comments, email us at [email protected].

In this patch of your weekly Dispatch:Big hands add ETHU.S. CPI arrives WednesdaySpaceX goes publicMarket cast

BTC navigates a confluence of supportBitcoin is consolidating near a confluence of key support levels, with technical indicators across both timeframes approaching oversold territory – a setup that warrants attention in the sessions ahead.

On the weekly chart, price has pulled back to the 200-period SMA, a key trend indicator currently acting as dynamic support, while simultaneously hovering near the lower Bollinger Band – a volatility indicator that marks the outer boundary of the current price range. Momentum indicators are sending a cautious signal: both the RSI and Stochastic oscillators are sitting right at the edge of oversold territory. Meanwhile, the MACD histogram – a trend and momentum indicator, manages to hold slightly above the zero line, a level worth watching closely.

On the daily timeframe, price is trading below most major SMAs, with trend indicators broadly reflecting the prevailing bearish pressure. However, momentum indicators are beginning to show early signs of a shift – both the RSI and Stochastic signal lines, while still in oversold territory, are trending upward, suggesting the selling pressure could be fading. The MACD histogram remains in negative territory and will need to reclaim the zero line to confirm any meaningful recovery.

Key levels to watch: Support sits at the immediate $63,000 level, with the next significant floor around $60,000. The 200-period weekly SMA also continues to serve as dynamic support on any further downside. To the upside, the first resistance to clear is around $64,000, followed by a more meaningful hurdle at the $68,000–$69,000 zone.

The big idea

Bitcoin: Near the buying zone?We've held a hopeful view on Bitcoin's recovery for some time now. The macro environment had other ideas. May's nonfarm payrolls came in at 172,000 – more than double expectations, reinforcing a labor market that simply hasn't given the Federal Reserve reason to ease. Rate-cut hopes have since faded, with markets now pricing in a probability of rate hikes before year-end. Add to that the ongoing U.S.-Iran tensions keeping energy prices elevated, and the conditions for a sustained rally just haven't been there.

Beneath the macro noise, one on-chain signal is quietly approaching a threshold that has marked a turning point in every previous Bitcoin cycle. It functions less like a price target and more like a law of gravity. It's called the realized price – the average cost basis of every bitcoin in circulation, calculated from the last time each coin actually moved on-chain. Right now, that number sits around $54,000. Bitcoin has traded below it during every major bear market, and each time, it has recovered. With the market now down more than 22% over the past month, the realized price is coming into view. Head over to this week’s data story for the chart.

The past few weeks have seen meaningful pressure across the market. Bitcoin briefly dipped below $60,000 last week, as spot ETFs recorded $4.2 billion in outflows over three consecutive weeks. Beneath that, though, the data is beginning to look familiar. The 200-week moving average was touched last week at around $61,300, a long-term support level that has held through every previous cycle. On-chain capitulation metrics are at levels not seen since 2022. CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju notes that bear markets have typically ended near the realized price. Standard Chartered signaled the current range could come to be a "buying zone."

Bitcoin's recovery back above $63,000 over the weekend, analysts say, may be an early sign that sellers are running out of conviction. That doesn't make a recovery certain, or its timing predictable, but with so many on-chain signals aligned at historically significant levels, the ingredients for a cycle low are accumulating. Whether they've fully ripened is a question only time and price action can answer.

Ethereum

Signals under ETH’s pullback?Ethereum fell more than 16% last week, briefly slipping below $1,600 as geopolitical tensions, a cautious Fed, and ETF outflows weighed on the broader market – a far cry from the $4,000 year-end target Standard Chartered floated in our last issue. 

Beneath the decline, though, large wallets were quietly accumulating. The biggest cohort of whale addresses added roughly 290,000 ETH in the first week of June, while mid-sized wallets trimmed their positions, suggesting conviction is concentrated at the top end of the holder spectrum. Meanwhile, exchange reserves across major platforms fell by around 475,000 ETH. Coins leaving exchanges tend to signal holding intent rather than selling pressure for the same pattern emerging in Bitcoin: the hands most likely to hold through a cycle are the ones adding at these levels.

Macroeconomic roundup

Macro clarity or complexity – this week decidesFive releases, three central banks, and a U.S. inflation print that could reset expectations for the rest of the summer. This is the week the macro picture gets a little clearer — or a lot more complicated.

U.S. CPI (Jun 10): Headline expected at 4.2% YoY, up from 3.8%. The week's most market-moving release.

ECB Interest Rate Decision (Jun 11): Expected hike to 2.25% from 2.00%, signaling Europe's tightening cycle still has room to run.

U.S. PPI & Jobless Claims (Jun 11): Both PPI figures expected to ease; claims at 218K — steady and unlikely to shift sentiment.

U.K. GDP (Jun 12): Expected contraction of 0.1% MoM after prior growth of 0.3% — a further softening of the European economy.

TradFi trends

Gold stumbles, SpaceX goes publicSpaceX has priced its IPO at $135 per share, targeting a $75 billion raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation. For crypto markets, the listing is notable for one reason: SpaceX carries nearly 19,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet, bringing meaningful indirect BTC exposure into public markets for the first time.

Gold, meanwhile, has broken below its 200-day moving average for the first time since October 2023, slipping under $4,300 and into bear market territory. The move was driven by the same stronger-than-expected jobs report that pressured crypto – a reminder that macro forces move markets broadly, not selectively.

The week's most interesting data story

Where Bitcoin forms a bottomAs discussed in this week's big idea, the realized price is the metric worth understanding right now. The realized price – the average cost basis of every holder on the network, currently sits at $54,000. With spot prices near $63,000, the average Bitcoin acquisition is still sitting on an unrealized gain. In every previous bear market, Bitcoin has fallen to or below this level, and every time it has, it has recovered. What's telling about this cycle is that it hasn't happened once. That's not a guarantee of anything, but historically, it's exactly the kind of floor that long-term cycles are built on.

The numbers

The week’s most interesting numbers$2.6 billion — Net ETF outflows year-to-date, but Bernstein says Bitcoin's "boring cycle" doesn't dent the store-of-value thesis.

4.59% — Bitmine bought 127,000 ETH for $207 million into the downturn, bringing its treasury to almost 5% of ETH's total circulating supply.

100 — The U.S. Dollar Index has crossed back above this level for the first time in two months, driven by May's blowout jobs report. 

17 days – Ethereum ETFs had gone 17 consecutive sessions without a net inflow before finally reversing on June 4, pulling in $19.3 million.

$5.5 billion — The tokenized stocks market has grown 147% since January, as crypto-native investors increasingly seek equity exposure on-chain.

Hot topic

What the community is discussingVisualizing the BTC bottom?

Doesn’t this show BTC is currently discounted?

Back to regular business.

Dispatch is a weekly publication by Nexo, designed to help you navigate and take action in the evolving world of digital assets. To share your Dispatch suggestions and comments, email us at [email protected].

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