Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Spark has deployed approximately $150 million in stablecoin liquidity across two Uniswap v4 pools on Ethereum as part of a collaboration aimed at creating shared liquidity and exchange infrastructure for stablecoin issuers.
A Spark spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the initial deployment is live in two pools pairing USDS with PayPal USD (PYUSD) and USDT, with USDS serving as the foundation. Spark described the deployment as one of the largest automated market maker (AMM) liquidity migrations in DeFi.
“These pools represent the initial deployment of approximately $150 million of liquidity and establish the first phase of the Stablecoin FX Layer,” the spokesperson said. “This initial deployment focuses on bootstrapping shared liquidity on Uniswap v4.”
Earlier this month, Standard Chartered identified Uniswap as a potential beneficiary of tokenized assets moving into DeFi. It forecast that total assets held in DeFi could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030, with Uniswap potentially emerging as a liquidity venue for the growing market.
The deployment announced Thursday lays the groundwork for a planned programmable liquidity system that could reduce the need for banks, financial technology firms and stablecoin issuers to build separate liquidity networks while testing whether Uniswap can make onchain capital more efficient without weakening market depth.
Spark plans programmable liquidity expansion
Spark said it plans to introduce its Shared Liquidity Layer and DualPool hook in subsequent phases using Uniswap v4’s programmable architecture to coordinate how liquidity is distributed across stablecoin markets.
A liquidity hook enables protocols to seamlessly integrate with platforms for capital access and developing yield and trading strategies.
Spark said a hook is intended to allow capital not immediately needed for trades to be deployed into governance-approved products, liquidity venues and yield-generating strategies.
The implementation of the DualPool hook will go through a separate security review, testing and production-readiness process before deployment. The first phase uses standard Uniswap v4 pools rather than the planned programmable framework.
Related: Aave positioned to capture tokenized asset growth in DeFi: Standard Chartered
Spark said the planned framework is intended to give future stablecoin issuers access to shared liquidity rather than requiring them to individually bootstrap pools, coordinate market makers and manage inventory across different venues.
The spokesperson told Cointelegraph that Spark is working with additional partners across the stablecoin ecosystem but is not yet ready to disclose those integrations.
Uniswap seen as winner as tokenized assets move onchain
In a June 15 note to clients, StanChart’s bank’s head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, said that tokenized treasures, equities, bonds and other assets could bring more trading activity and liquidity to decentralized exchanges as their DeFi use expands.
DeFi total value locked as of June 25. Source: DefiLlama
This new $150 million migration offers a more immediate test of StanChart’s infrastructure thesis, though it involves stablecoins rather than tokenized securities.
The migration also follows Uniswap’s push into institutional tokenized-asset trading. On Feb. 12, BlackRock said it would bring its $2.1 billion tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, to Uniswap, allowing eligible institutional investors and market makers to trade the security through decentralized infrastructure.
Magazine: Japanese pension fund tips 1% in crypto, G7 urges action on NK hackers: Asia Express
Jiang Zhuoer, one of China’s best-known bitcoin BTC$59,300.56 miners and founder of the LeBit mining pool, predicted that the current bear market will bottom in the fourth quarter at roughly $42,000-$44,000.
The forecast, made in Chinese on X, puts the low some 30% below bitcoin’s current level near $60,700, and rests less on the cryptocurrency’s performance than on Strategy, the largest corporate holder of the token, according to an automated translation.
Jiang analyzed Strategy’s market net asset value (mNAV), the ratio of the company’s stock price to the per-share value of the bitcoin it holds, which has dropped to 0.72. A number above 1 means investors value the company at a premium to its bitcoin stack; below 1 means they value it at less.
Jiang’s figure has the market pricing Strategy about 28% below the bitcoin it owns, a sign of deep pessimism toward the trade.
That reading is close to the 0.7 low Strategy hit on May 11, 2022, during the last bull-to-bear turn, he said, which leads him to think mNAV is near its floor for this cycle.
Sharplink, Bitmine and Joe Lubin are backing Ethlabs as the Ethereum Foundation cuts its budget 40%, but no one will say how much money is behind the new lab
Ethlabs, a new Ethereum research lab backed by the network’s two largest corporate holders, launched this week with a pitch to complement the Ethereum Foundation.
Its own funders concede it will also compete as Ethlabs is “playing to win.”
“I think they will be complementary,” Joseph Chalom, chief executive of Sharplink and a former longtime BlackRock executive, said of Ethlabs and the Foundation on a livestream The Defiant hosted this week. He then added that the two would “over time” be “in some ways overlapping,” with “the densest talent” concentrated at Ethlabs.
Where the Mandates Meet
The overlap is visible in what each group says it will do. The Foundation reorganized this week into five units, including a protocol layer focused on scaling and hardening Ethereum’s base layer and an institutional layer aimed at enterprise adoption. Ethlabs describes its own work in nearly the same terms: faster settlement, cross-chain interoperability and readiness for institutional and AI-driven activity. Both invoke credible neutrality and censorship resistance.
Viktor Bunin, a protocol specialist at Coinbase who is listed as an Ethlabs contributor, said the rivalry is built into how Ethereum ships code.
“There’s a natural competition between every single EIP, every single effort that goes into it,” he said, using the shorthand for Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Each network upgrade holds only so many changes, he said, so independent groups end up competing for the same slots.
The launch is the clearest sign yet that Ethereum is betting on a fragmented, multi-organization model of development. That is a deliberate contrast with rival blockchains such as Solana, where a single foundation drives the roadmap, the funding and the marketing. Supporters say spreading the work across independent groups keeps Ethereum harder to capture or censor. The risk is slower, messier coordination as several well-funded teams pull in different directions over a fixed upgrade schedule. For a network worth about $194 billion, the open question is which model better serves the institutions now moving onchain.
A Bet on Many Hands
Not everyone building Ethlabs is convinced the model is the right one. Bunin, despite backing the lab, said he would prefer a single organization closely attuned to its users.
“I actually don’t like the structure,” he said. He called the Foundation’s retreat from the network’s most pressing problems “a little bit of a failure,” arguing the EF has chosen to work on what it wants rather than what users are asking for.
Chalom defended the fragmented approach. He likened it to Winston Churchill’s description of democracy as the least-bad system: imperfect and harder to coordinate, but genuinely censorship-resistant and impossible for any single party to override. He said Ethereum has run without downtime since its 2015 launch, a record he argued more centralized chains cannot claim.
Big Backers, No Number
The structural debate sits on top of a money problem. Trent Van Epps, who coordinated Ethereum Foundation core development until April, warned last week that the network’s core development faces a funding gap within three to nine months, as the Foundation’s treasury cuts and the expiry of its four-year client-funding program converge. He estimated core development costs about $30 million a year.
Bitmine chairman Tom Lee, whose firm is now an Ethlabs anchor, dismissed the warning, putting the odds of a crisis at “zero chance” and arguing that profit-seeking corporate stakers, not the Foundation, will underwrite Ethereum’s future. It’s nw clear Lee was referring to Ethlabs.
The squeeze tightened this week. The Foundation said it would cut its 2026 budget by about 40% and eliminate 54 jobs, or roughly 20% of its staff. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin framed the cuts as a deliberate shift to an endowment model, lowering annual spending from about 15% of the treasury toward 5% by 2030.
ETH fell about 3% over the past 24 hours, underperforming a 2.6% slide in Bitcoin, according to CoinGecko, and trades roughly 67% below its August 2025 record.
Against that backdrop, Ethlabs arrives with heavyweight support. Bitmine Immersion Technologies, which holds about 5.7 million ETH, and Sharplink, which holds roughly 876,000 ETH, anchored the funding alongside Lubin. Neither the lab nor its backers stated the total funding behinf Ethlabs. The only public figure is the contributor wallet Ethlabs listed, eth-labs.eth, which held about 49 ETH, or roughly $80,000, as of this week.
Pressed for a dollar figure, Chalom declined to give one.
“Trust us on this,” he said, describing “multi-year funding” drawn partly from the staking rewards on the backers’ ETH and partly from personal contributions. “This is not here to fund five people for a year,” he said. He said Ethlabs would operate as a nonprofit with annual outside audits and openly published research.
“If you can’t audit it, you can’t trust it,” he said.
‘Alignment,’ or Capture?
The funding model raises a question the Foundation’s structure was built to avoid: whether backers who are themselves large ETH holders could steer development toward their own interests. The interests are tightly linked. Lubin, an Ethlabs anchor in his own right, chairs Sharplink, and Chalom previously led digital assets at BlackRock, whose iShares Ethereum Trust is the largest US spot-ETH fund.
Chalom said the design prevents capture. Backers hold observer seats and can verify how money is spent but cannot direct research, amend governance or block disbursements, he said. Board seats rotate among independent members, neither Sharplink nor Bitmine chairman Tom Lee sits on the board, and grants are administered externally. “This is the opposite of a conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s an alignment of interest.”
Bunin argued capture is impractical regardless. A proposal that plainly favored one party “would never even pass the sniff test” with client teams and the wider community, he said.
The deeper tension is one Ethereum has wrestled with before: what is best for ETH the asset is not always what is best for the protocol. The decision to push activity onto Layer 2 networks lowered fees and weakened the fee burn that underpinned the case for ETH as scarce, “ultrasound” money. Daily base-layer fees that once ran near $30 million have spent much of 2026 in the single-digit millions. Both Chalom and Bunin said Ethereum has to win as a network before the token can, and Ethlabs says it will keep prioritizing adoption and scaling over near-term value capture — the same path the Foundation has taken.
A Foundation Pulling Back
Ethlabs is the most prominent product of a broader unwinding at the Foundation. At least eight senior figures have left this year, including both co-executive directors: Tomasz Stańczak departed in February and Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned this month, leaving board member Bastian Aue as effectively the sole executive director. A mandate the Foundation published in March recast it from Ethereum’s primary steward to one of several, and this week’s reorganization sorted it into five units and wound down its privacy and scaling research lab.
Lubin has described the shift as a move toward multiple “steward nodes” sharing responsibility for the network. Chalom said Ethlabs is the first of several private-sector initiatives that would be announced “over the next several weeks.”
The First Test
The first real test comes with Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s next major upgrade, now in final testnet preparation and targeted for the second half of the year. It centers on changes to how blocks are built and executed, the base-layer scaling work that both the Foundation and Ethlabs claim as a priority and the first place their roadmaps will meet a finite upgrade queue.
Bitcoin price is trading near $61,500 today, extending a decline that has erased more than half its value since the token hit a record high in October 2025. The sell-off is rippling through publicly traded crypto companies, where losses have at times outpaced Bitcoin itself.
The token fell to $61,877 earlier this week — its lowest level since June 11 — before sliding further. Bitcoin price briefly broke below $60,000 on June 5, a level not seen since late 2024, before a partial recovery that has since stalled.
Deutsche Bank attributed Bitcoin’s weakness to a convergence of institutional pressures. A shift in Federal Reserve expectations — the bank now forecasts two rate hikes in 2026, reversing earlier expectations for cuts — has removed a key pillar of institutional demand. Higher rates make risk assets less attractive relative to cash and bonds.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen six consecutive weeks of net outflows totaling roughly $6 billion, with $2.4 billion leaving in June alone. Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure described Bitcoin as “increasingly trading like an institutional risk asset,” with the marginal buyer now an ETF allocator or corporate treasury rather than a retail participant. When those buyers exit, the price follows.
Competition from artificial intelligence has added pressure. U.S. tech giants are on track to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, and investors are treating Bitcoin and AI-linked equities as competing destinations for speculative capital. A tech stock sell-off that began Monday pulled Bitcoin price lower in tandem, with the Nasdaq 100 falling as much as 3.4%.
Blood in the streets for the bitcoin price and for crypto stocks
The pain has been acute for companies that built their business models around Bitcoin accumulation.
Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, has fallen for five consecutive trading sessions and is down more than 20% over the past week.
The stock is off 26% over the past 30 days. A major catalyst came in late May when Strategy sold 32 BTC for approximately $2.5 million — its first Bitcoin sale since 2022 — to cover distributions on its preferred stock. The move shattered the company’s “buy only, never sell” identity and spooked investors.
Strategy carries five series of preferred stock with combined annual dividend obligations estimated at $750–$800 million, and its cash reserves have fallen from $2.25 billion at the start of 2026 to around $900 million.
Strive, the Bitcoin treasury company backed by Vivek Ramaswamy, has also taken a hit. The company purchased 2,500 BTC for $185 million at an average price of $74,092 — well above current levels — leaving it sitting on paper losses. Shares of Strive (ASST) dropped after the purchase was disclosed, a sign that investors are skeptical of aggressive accumulation strategies at elevated cost bases.
Strive now holds roughly 19,864 BTC valued at approximately $1.3 billion, and like Strategy, carries preferred dividend obligations that must be paid regardless of where Bitcoin price trades.
Coinbase fell 2.5% on Tuesday. Stablecoin issuer Circle dropped more than 4%.
At the time of writing, the bitcoin price is $61,205.
As bitcoin BTC$61,646.55 fell below $59,100 on Wednesday, the number held at a loss rose to a record 10.83 million BTC, data from Glassnode shows.
The largest cryptocurrency has tested the $60,000 level repeatedly since February, briefly falling below it several times. Four months ago, the supply in loss peaked at 9.8 million BTC. It climbed to 10.78 million in early June.
Looking at previous bear market bottoms, around 10.5 million BTC in loss is broadly consistent with the levels seen near cycle lows in 2019, 2020 and 2022.
Breaking this down further, 5.58 million BTC are held at a loss by long-term holders (LTHs), defined by Glassnode as investors who have held their coins for at least 155 days. This is the second-highest level on record, behind only March 2020, when more than 5.6 million of the cohort’s bitcoin were held at a loss.
Even so, long-term holders now control approximately 14.8 million BTC, another all-time high. With roughly 20 million BTC in circulation, these investors hold close to 75% of the circulating supply, 37% of which are in the red,
Historically, long-term holders tend to accumulate and continue holding throughout bear markets, increasing their share of the supply. During periods of peak bull-market euphoria, they typically begin selling into market strength.
Besides, both core and headline readings may be seen as stale, or backward looking, considering the recent slide in oil prices. WTI crude futures have dropped to $70, significantly below the $100-plus level seen during the Iran war in March and April. Headline inflation is expected to hit 4.1%, the highest since early 2023, driven largely by energy prices.
“The main question is less whether both headline and core go up—they are widely expected to—but rather how “stale” these numbers already are,” economist Mohamed A. El Erian, the former CEO of Pimco, noted on X.
“These numbers come before the recent sharp fall in oil prices, which will result in lower headline inflation and ease some of the pressures on core. The question being debated is by how much, including whether May will prove to be the peak inflation month.”
Beyond inflation numbers, watch out for volatility in Strategy’s common shares, MSTR, and preferred stock, STRC, plus AI names on Wall Street. MSTR is flashing a well-recognized major bearish pattern (Check the Daily Signal). Stay alert!
Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”
The crypto market showed signs of resilience on Thursday, with bitcoin BTC$61,240.95 adding 1.1% since midnight UTC after dipping below $60,000 on Wednesday to its lowest since October 2024.
The largest cryptocurrency remains at a critical level in terms of broader market structure. A potential break lower in price could trigger a slide to around $52,000. For now, it appears to have weathered the storm.
Ether (ETH) rose 1.5% on Thursday and was recently trading at $1,644 after briefly tumbling to $1,550 at around 17:00 UTC on Wednesday.
Thursday’s gains can possibly be linked to a recovery in U.S. equities. S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures are 0.7% and 2.2% higher, respectively.
Derivatives positioning
BTC revisited lows near $59,000 on Wednesday and has since bounced back to over $61,000.
The two-way volatility has proven costly for leveraged futures bets across the market. Centralized exchanges liquidated nearly $1 billion in crypto futures positions within 24 hours, with longs accounting for the largest portion.
Still, bitcoin’s futures open interest (OI) has jumped to 763K BTC, the most since June 4, ending a stretch of steadiness around 730K BTC. In other words, the price drop has triggered an inflow of money, but not necessarily on the bullish side. In fact, annualized funding rates have flipped negative, a sign of traders paying a premium for downside exposure.
The ether futures market hasn’t seen any notable increase in OI, and funding rates remain slightly positive.
SOL’s OI remains near Wednesday’s record high, alongside largely neutral funding rates that point to balanced positioning in the market. The same is true for XRP, whose OI is hovering at its highest levels since October.
The OI-normalized, 24-hour cumulative volume delta for most coins, including BTC, is negative for a third straight day. That’s a sign bears are leading the price action by shorting at market prices rather than using passive limit orders.
BVIV, which measures the 30-day implied volatility in BTC, has pulled back to 46% a high of 51%. This decline in the so-called “fear gauge,” representing demand for options, supports the cryptocurrency’s overnight rebound. The same is true for ether’s implied volatility index, EVIV.
Still, ether is seen as more volatile than BTC, with implied volatilities richer by 10 points or more compared with bitcoin’s across all timeframes.
Option skews for the two largest cryptocurrencies indicate downside concerns that are both persistent and strengthening . For instance, BTC’s one-week skew shows a nearly 25-point volatility premium for puts. This also means upside bets are currently cheap and could draw strong demand should Thursday’s U.S. Core PCE for May reveal a slowdown in inflation.
Token talk
The altcoin market posted an exaggerated bounce on Thursday after losses on Wednesday, a reflection of a low-liquidity environment.
Jupiter (JUP) fell by more than 12% in six hours on Wednesday before bouncing by more than 18%, liquidating futures traders in both directions.
Coinglass data shows that $1 billion in futures positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours, with $585 million of that being attributed to altcoin trading pairs.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens AAVE and ETHFI also performed well on Thursday, rising by 2.5% and 4.7%, respectively, since midnight.
AI tokens, meanwhile, struggled to recover. RENDER and NEAR posted losses of between 0.8% and 1.9% despite a bounce across other crypto sectors.
Layer-1 network token solana (SOL) tumbled to $64 on Wednesday to complete a 75% slide since September. A break below June 6’s low of $60 would mark its lowest point since December 2023.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said CoinEx served as a gateway for the crypto sector in Iran, having traced more than $3.84 billion in flows between the exchange and sanctioned Iranian entities in the last seven years.
TRM Labs said CoinEx became the single biggest trading partner of Iran’s largest crypto exchange Nobitex, which accounted for around $2.7 billion of the flows, according to a report published Wednesday.
CoinEx had direct transaction exposure with more than 60 Iranian crypto platforms, according to TRM Labs’ analysis, which argued that this patterns suggested a coordinated relationship rather than organic market activity.
TRM Labs identified CoinEx exposure to several terrorist-linked entities, such as $6 million in transactions involving wallets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and $374,000 of exposure associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The U.S. Treasury sanctioned an array of Iranian crypto exchanges as part of its campaign against the country’s government at the start of this month, including Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex, all of which are cited in TRM Labs’ report.
Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen 3% over the past 24 hours, trading into a dense buy-side liquidity zone after slipping below $61,000. More than $525 million in buy bids initially stacked between $60,500 and $61,500 created a key area of demand as liquidation risk builds on both sides of the market.
BTC’s orderbook data shows concentrated liquidity pockets below $60,500 and near $65,000, placing liquidity flows at the center of Bitcoin’s short-term price action.
Bitcoin momentum weakens below $63,000
Bitcoin closed at $62,700 on Tuesday, its lowest daily candle close since June 10. The move also produced a bearish engulfing candle against Monday’s range, erasing the prior day’s gains and signaling weaker short-term momentum.
The price has since consolidated beneath $63,000 after losing that level as support. The one-hour chart shows a series of lower highs following the rejection near $66,000 earlier this week. The momentum indicator, or relative strength index (RSI), has cooled from recent overbought levels, while Bitcoin continues to trade above the June range low near $60,500.
Crypto trader Lennaert Snyder called for caution and expected BTC to test the lower liquidity before considering long exposure. The trader said,
“Bitcoin started a little bounce, but I’m not convinced and not buying in yet,” Snyder wrote in a recent market update.
The trader identified $61,500 and $60,500 as the primary levels to watch for bullish reactions. On the upside, he pointed to $63,500 and $64,000 as potential areas where liquidity could attract price before another move lower.
Related: Multi-year Bitcoin holder selling falls to 19-month low as halving model flags new market bottom date
$530 million in BTC buy bids sit below $61,000
Data from Velo shows that BTC traders initially added 8,366 BTC to bid liquidity between $61,500 and $60,500. At the time of writing, Bitcoin has traded through a significant portion of that range, triggering roughly $270 million worth of buy orders as the price dipped below $61,000.
The remaining bids remain near the lower end of the liquidity cluster, where traders are attempting to absorb the latest wave of selling pressure.
BTC buy bids analysis. Source: Velo Chart
The move below $61,000 has already flushed a significant portion of the leveraged long positions clustered around $61,500. CoinGlass data shows more than $125 million in long liquidations over the past hour, reducing downside liquidation pressure near the current price.
With much of the nearby long-side leverage cleared out, the liquidation map now shows a growing imbalance toward short positions positioned above spot price.
Now, more than $1.2 billion in short positions sit near $63,500. A stabilization in the remaining bid liquidity around $60,500-$61,000 may shift attention toward those positions, especially as the downside liquidation pools become less concentrated following the latest flush.
Bitcoin liquidation map. Source: CoinGlass
The next major concentration of liquidation risk sits near $65,000, where more than $2.4 billion in short positions are vulnerable. Such setups often trigger fast moves as liquidations fuel additional buying. For now, the largest liquidity concentrations remain near $60,500, where both spot demand and leveraged exposure remain heavily stacked.
Related: BTC price four-year trend calls for $76K as analysis says Bitcoin ‘not broken’
