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Bitcoin Stays Steered by Iran Nerves as BTC Price Drops Under $73,000

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Bitcoin Stays Steered by Iran Nerves as BTC Price Drops Under $73,000

Bitcoin (BTC) heads into June with new local lows as the US-Iran war drives crypto market nerves.

  • Iran ceasefire hopes hang in the balance as military strikes return, but US President Donald Trump appears confident that “it will all work out well in the end.”
  • BTC price weakness quickly returns after the May close, with $72,000 liquidity on the radar.
  • US employment data could still deliver a classic BTC price tailwind.
  • Bitcoin long-term holders are putting February’s $60,000 lows in doubt as a reliable floor.
  • Sentiment research calls for a flush of overly optimistic traders’ positions next.

Trump on Iran: “Just sit back and relax”

News of strikes on Iranian targets keep the Middle East conflict firmly on the radar as a source of crypto market volatility this week.

Exchanges of fire meant that BTC price action quickly came under pressure following the monthly close, dropping below $73,000.

BTC/USD one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The latest events further brought into question the odds of a ceasefire being signed, with this notionally meant to last at least 60 days.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” US president Donald Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Monday.

Trump referenced hurdles in the form of political dissent at home — rather than specific problems involving Iran itself — as the reason for the lack of progress.

He concluded:

“Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end – It always does!”

Source: Truth Social

Despite Bitcoin feeling the heat, US stocks looked set to continue a trend of divergence with crypto as the new week began. S&P 500 futures opened the week up by around 0.25%.

Commenting on the factors driving the equities rally, which last week saw repeat new all-time highs, trading resource Mosaic Asset Company put AI firmly in focus.

“The narrative driving the stock market has hardly changed in recent weeks,” it wrote in the latest edition of its regular analysis series, Mosaic Chart Alerts. 

“Optimism around a potential peace deal between the U.S. and Iran helps to spark a rally in the major indexes. For the most part, there has been very little substance behind the headlines, but that hasn’t stopped the rally in stocks linked to the AI infrastructure buildout.”

Bitcoin price caught between liquidity and CME gap

Bitcoin started the first week of June with a bump as US-Iran war tensions quickly spilled over into BTC price action.

Data from TradingView shows a trip below $73,000 just hours after the weekly and monthly candle close.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

“For now price is stuck within this mini-range since last week,” trader Daan Crypto Trades summarized in his latest analysis on X. 

“~$74.2K keeps rejecting price as resistance while ~$72.7K is held as support. Those are the levels to watch in the short term.”

BTC/USDT perpetual contract one-hour chart. Source: Daan Crypto Trades/X

Trader CW suggested that the price was targeting nearby high-liquidity levels on exchange order books, notably a position closer to $72,000.

“The buy wall for $BTC whales is at 72k and the sell wall is at 80k,” they added.

BTC order-book liquidation heatmap. Source: CW/X

A silver lining came from the weekly close itself, which preserved what trader and analyst Rekt Capital said would be a key level for bulls — $73,000.

“If Bitcoin manages to Weekly Close above $73k then price will be one step closer to confirming the Double Bottom breakout & be positioned to try to trend continue,” he told X followers at the weekend.

To the upside, trader CrypNuevo flagged a lone CME Group’s Bitcoin futures near $75,000 as a potential short-term BTC price target.

CME Bitcoin futures 15-minute chart. Source: CrypNuevo/X

As Cointelegraph reported, CME gaps became a thing of the past last week as its futures market started to trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

CrypNuevo said that they were looking for a “W”-shaped reversal pattern for price on low time frames.

PMI leads potential BTC price boost sources

The coming week sees inflation data yield to employment cues as the labor market becomes traders’ key focus.

Monday starts with the May print of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) — one of two core PMI releases this week.

ISM has been in a fresh uptrend since earlier in the year, when it ended a three-year period of contraction and immediately delivered a tailwind to Bitcoin price performance.

Commenting, entrepreneur and investor Mark Chadwick had some good news for crypto bulls. Based on business cycles, recent PMI figures could preclude a new period of gains.

“Expansion zones perfectly align with previous Alt Seasons – and we’re about to expand! The data backs it up too: ISM PMI has been above 50 for 3 straight months. Above 50 = expansion,” he wrote in an X post alongside data from pseudonymous analyst TechDev.

BTC/USD versus employment cycle. Source: Mark Chadwick/X

The coming days also see US nonfarm payrolls numbers, providing a snapshot of the labor market against a backdrop of rising inflation.

In a note of caution, Mosaic Asset Company reminded readers of last week’s high Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation report.

“For investors hoping that the boost in inflation could be temporary from the jump in energy prices, the report contained bad news,” it continued. 

“The core goods figure that excludes food and energy rose by 2.8% and is one of the biggest increases in decades outside of the pandemic aftermath.”

US PCE index % change (screenshot). Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Bitcoin long-term holders may produce a new bear-market low

Bitcoin holder trends mean that the BTC price bottom may well still be ahead in the 2026 bear market.

New findings from onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant cast doubt on the BTC price rebound from multiyear lows near $60,000.

“A rebound during a downtrend is hard to read as a bottom, because even within it the LTH (long-term holder) UTXO share keeps rising rather than declining,” contributor AbstractRyu wrote in a Quicktake blog post on Monday.

The post compares unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) involving coins dormant for more than or less than six months, with the former classed as LTH coins. 

“On Realized Cap – UTXO Age Bands (%), there are only two ways the LTH (6m+) share grows: existing holdings age in place without being spent, or STH (short-term holder) coins cross the six-month mark and reclassify as LTH,” it explains. 

“Neither reflects fresh demand reviving turnover. That is why a rising share, on its own, is hard to read as bullish.”

Bitcoin UTXO age data (screenshot). Source: CryptoQuant

As such, even BTC/USD rebounding by $20,000 versus its local lows is not enough to insure the market against a new macro floor. For this, LTH activity must pick up via some form of “distribution” phase.

“At present, the LTH band share has not declined at all, even through the rebounds marked by the blue circles,” AbstractRyu concluded alongside an explanatory chart. 

“Distribution has not begun, and last month’s rebound, too, was likely a dead-cat bounce. The bottom is not yet in.”

Bitcoin “long-leaning bias” in need of a flush

Bitcoin continues to field concerns over a “long squeeze” thanks to overly bullish bets on BTC price action.

Related: Bitcoin price record 90-day uptrend ‘resembles bull market rally:’ New analysis

In an analysis over the weekend, CryptoQuant contributor Nino flagged positive funding rates as an ongoing signal to be “cautious” in the current market.

Funding rates, as Cointelegraph reported, have flipped net positive, indicating a “long-leaning bias” among traders. 

Now, on a three-day rolling basis, funding is approaching its highest levels since the start of the year — even as price action itself tracks sideways.

“Recent market observations suggest that the 72-period moving average cluster for funding rates is showing a positive bias, approaching levels reminiscent of the peak seen in late January 2026,” Nino summarized. 

“Coupled with the current stagnation in price action, this dynamic could imply an accumulation of long positions that have yet to translate into sustained upward momentum.”

Bitcoin funding rate data (screenshot). Source: CryptoQuant

The implication is that price could redress the balance of longs and shorts by liquidating the former with a drop to new local lows.

“Consequently, the short-term outlook appears somewhat cautious, raising the possibility of a near-term downward leg as the market might need to clear potential excess leverage,” Nino added.

In its own analysis, crypto sentiment platform Santiment described the overall market mood as its most “lopsided positive” of 2026 so far.

“The current euphoria contrasts sharply with the bearish ETF flow picture and warrants caution,” it advised.

BTC, ETH prices drop even as futures show growing taste for risk. XLM, HYPE gain: Crypto Markets Today

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BTC, ETH prices drop even as futures show growing taste for risk. XLM, HYPE gain: Crypto Markets Today

June kicked off in the red for crypto markets as the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire and peace talks failed to translate into reduced tensions in the region. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) fell 2% since midnight UTC, with bitcoin BTC$72,527.76 and ether (ETH) both losing about 1%.

At $72,700, bitcoin is currently negative for a sixth time in seven days, following a 3.5% slide last month, usually a period with positive returns. It averages a 7.4% rise in May, according to Coinglass data. A record 10 days of net withdrawals from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw $2.97 billion leave the investment vehicles.

The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index led the day’s decliners, dropping 2.6% since midnight, with all six members lower. Ondo Finance’s ONDO token fell 2.8%, and has now lost 17% since founder Nathan Allman died unexpectedly last week.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE stood out, adding 1.26% since midnight. A five-day streak of gains took it to a record high $73.94, its fourth in four days, as capital enters newly introduced ETFs based on the token, which started trading only last month.

U.S. stock indexes replayed Friday’s divergence, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 micro-futures both adding about 0.2%.

Derivatives positioning

  • BTC open interest sits at $19.5 billion, essentially level from a week ago, with speculative positioning also broadly unchanged.
  • Funding rates are positive across multiple venues at 0%–10% annualized, with the prior Deribit spike now back to normal. The three-month annualized basis is 2.8%, up from 2.2% last week, pointing to a mild improvement in institutional risk appetite.
  • Options positioning leans modestly bullish. Put/call volume over the past 24 hours splits 61/39 in favor of calls, while one-week 25-delta skew sits at 12.3% compared with 12.4% last week. Front-end implied volatility (DVOL) has ticked up to 37 from multi-month lows, suggesting the recent compression may be easing. The 1 month–6 month term structure remains in contango, with markets continuing to price near-term calm alongside longer-dated uncertainty.
  • Coinglass data shows $282 million in 24 hour liquidations, with a 60-40 split between longs and shorts. ETH (59 million) and BTC ($48 million) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations.
  • The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $72,280 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price drop.

Token talk

  • Stellar’s XLM jumped 40.4% in 24 hours to $0.2862, lifting market cap above $9.6 billion, on the back of a May 27 announcement that DTCC, Wall Street’s central clearinghouse, will connect its tokenized securities platform to the Stellar network in the first half of 2027.
  • The deal makes Stellar the first public blockchain in DTCC’s multichain tokenization strategy.
  • Open interest (OI) in XLM perps rose 10.9% to about $361 million as the rally unfolded, CoinGlass data show, with roughly $12 million in derivatives liquidations across the move. The combination of expanding OI alongside rising spot volume points to fresh long positioning rather than short covering doing the heavy lifting, even with the short squeeze underneath.
  • Spot turnover hit about $2.3 billion on the day, up about 34%, showing the move was backed by real demand rather than a thin-liquidity spike. XLM outperformed every other top-20 token over the period.
  • The breakout cleared a monthslong descending channel that had constrained the token since late last year, with the rally running from long-term support near $0.14 through prior resistance at $0.20 and $0.26.
  • DTCC oversees more than $114 trillion in assets and processes about $2.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually, putting Stellar’s selection at the center of how Wall Street brings tokenized stocks, ETFs and U.S. Treasuries onto a public blockchain.
  • The partnership sits on the SEC’s December 2025 No-Action Letter authorizing the firm to tokenize real-world assets it custodies, with production testing targeted for July, wider rollout in October, and broader availability in the first half of next year.

ADA governance vote kills Cardano Summit 2026, approves smaller TOKEN2049 plan

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ADA governance vote kills Cardano Summit 2026, approves smaller TOKEN2049 plan

Cardano’s flagship Summit will not take place in 2026 after the Cardano Foundation’s treasury proposal narrowly failed to secure the supermajority needed for approval, marking one of the clearest tests yet of the blockchain’s new governance system.

The Foundation said that it would cancel the Singapore event and begin winding down preparations, despite the proposal receiving majority support from delegated representatives, or DReps.

Unlike many crypto ecosystems where foundations retain broad discretion over conference budgets and ecosystem spending, Cardano now requires community approval for major treasury withdrawals thanks to the Voltaire governance process.

Delegated representatives were introduced as part of Cardano’s Voltaire governance overhaul, a 2024 upgrade that gave ADA holders the ability to elect representatives to vote on treasury spending and protocol decisions.

The Foundation’s Summit proposal became one of the largest and most visible tests yet of that system, asking DReps to decide whether millions of ADA should be spent on the ecosystem’s flagship annual gathering.

The vote followed a broader governance debate that began with a combined proposal from the Cardano Foundation and EMURGO seeking more than 14 million ADA to fund both the Summit and a major presence at TOKEN2049 Singapore. After DReps criticized the size of the request, organizers split the initiative into separate proposals and reduced the scope of the conference sponsorship.

The revised Summit proposal ultimately fell short of the two-thirds threshold required for treasury withdrawals, while EMURGO’s standalone TOKEN2049 proposal won approval. That proposal requests 3.3 million ADA, or about $793,000 based on the exchange rate used in the filing, to fund a Cardano-branded pavilion, builder showcase stage and ecosystem programming at the Singapore conference.

The Foundation said it would respect the outcome and begin winding down Summit preparations, calling the vote an example of the “thoughtful engagement that effective governance requires.”

Strategy keeps STRC payout unchanged amid push to maintain $100 share price

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Strategy keeps STRC payout unchanged amid push to maintain $100 share price

Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in Strategy (MSTR).

Strategy, the world’s largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin BTC$72,628.91, has maintained the 11.5% dividend rate on its perpetual preferred stock, Stretch (STRC), marking the fourth consecutive month without an increase.

STRC has undergone seven dividend increases since its introduction in July 2025 with a 9% dividend rate. Strategy was able to hold the current rate this month after the stock’s volume-weighted average price (VWAP) reached $99.62, keeping shares close enough to their $100 par value, a key objective of the product’s design.

Strategy markets STRC as a short-duration, high-yield savings alternative. The perpetual preferred stock pays monthly cash distributions, with the dividend rate reset each month to encourage trading near par value and minimize price volatility.

Although STRC has not traded at its $100 par value since May 14, STRC recently rebounded after falling as low as $97.11 on Thursday, recovering to around $99.10. The next ex-dividend date, the cutoff at which investors must own shares to receive the upcoming dividend payment, is June 15. Similar to trading patterns observed in May, STRC could briefly return to par in the days leading up to the ex-dividend date.

Maintaining a stable price near $100 is important for Strategy because it allows the company to efficiently issue additional shares through its at-the-market (ATM) program. Proceeds can be used to purchase more bitcoin or address corporate liabilities, including debt obligations such as its recently paid down some of its 2029 convertible notes.

Meanwhile, Executive Chairman Michael Saylor continued his customary Sunday social media posts, writing “Working Better.” The message comes amid growing investor focus on whether Strategy may eventually sell bitcoin to meet debt or dividend obligations, or whether it will continue using capital raised through its securities offerings to expand its bitcoin holdings.

U.S. Congress returns as GENIUS comments periods close, jobs report: Crypto Week Ahead

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U.S. Congress returns as GENIUS comments periods close, jobs report: Crypto Week Ahead

The first week of June may turn crypto’s 2025 policy wins into hard deadlines. Comment periods for the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules start closing this week, reaching the point where a federal framework stops being statute and becomes the operating rules issuers have to build to.

What gets settled in those windows decides who can issue, what reserves they hold and whether yield survives. Banks have spent the past few months pushing to slow the rollout, a fight over yield-bearing stablecoins that has already stalled the Clarity Act for months. The Senate floor opens June 3 to try again.

The value of stablecoins in circulation, which Samara Cohen, BlackRock’s global head of market development, called the “bridge between traditional finance and digital liquidity,” has kept rising and hit a record $322 billion in late May. The ECB is now warning these instruments could cement dollar dominance.

Macro and geopolitical impact will also need to be closely monitored. While economic data will provide further hints on the Fed’s future policy direction, an earlier-than-expected ceasefire in the Middle East could revive risk appetite.

What to Watch

(All times ET)

  • Crypto
    • June 2: Comment periods for GENIUS Act stablecoin frameworks close for the Treasury, FDIC and FinCEN/OFA
    • June 3: The Senate floor window reopens to consolidate the Clarity Act into a single vehicle with CFTC provisions and GENIUS Act updates, targeting a August signing.
    • Q3: Ethereum to move forward with the ‘Glamsterdam’ upgrade, featuring parallel execution, ePBS MEV reforms, a 200M gas limit target, and lower layer-1 transaction fees.
  • Macro
    • June 1, 10 a.m.: U.S. ISM Manufacturing PMI for May est. 52.6 (Prev. 52.7); Prices est. 85.3 (Prev. 84.6)
    • June 1, 6 p.m.: South Korea Inflation Rate YoY for May est. 3.0% (Prev. 2.6%)
    • June 2, 5 a.m.: Eurozone Inflation Rate YoY Flash for May est. 3.3% (Prev. 3.0%); Core Inflation YoY Flash est. 2.4% (Prev. 2.2%)
    • June 2, 10 a.m.: U.S. JOLTs Job Openings for April est. 6.8M (Prev. 6.866M)
    • June 3, 8:15 a.m.: U.S. ADP Employment Change for May est. 110K (Prev. 109K)
    • June 3, 10 a.m.: U.S. ISM Services PMI for May est. 53.6 (Prev. 53.6)
    • June 4, 8:30 a.m.: U.S. Initial Jobless Claims for period ending May 30 est. 216K (Prev. 215K)
    • June 5, 8:30 a.m.: U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls for May est. 96K (Prev. 115K); Unemployment Rate est. 4.3% (Prev. 4.3%)
    • June 5, 8:30 a.m.: U.S. Average Hourly Earnings MoM for May est. 0.3% (Prev. 0.2%)
    • June 7: OPEC+ 41st Ministerial Meeting and 66th JMMC
  • Earnings
    • June 1: HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE), post-market, -$0.22

Token Events

  • Governance Votes & Calls
    • Superfluid DAO is voting on continuing the yield backends for both ETHx and USDCx with their current code across all networks. Voting ends on June 1.
    • ENS DAO is voting on a social proposal to determine the structural framework and election timeline for Term 7 of its working groups. Voting ends on June 1.
    • ShapeShift DAO is voting to distribute $150,681.30 of unallocated exploit revenue to affected DeFi communities and to add discostu to the engineering workstream for business development. Voting ends on June 2 and June 3.
    • Decentraland DAO is voting on lowering the voting power (VP) threshold for governance proposals from 6 million to 5 million or less, aiming to address declining voter participation. Voting ends on June 2.
    • 1inch Network DAO is voting to renew its recognized delegate program for 12 months with an updated $220,000 budget and stricter performance criteria. Voting ends on June 3.
    • Arbitrum DAO is voting on proposals to fund the Arbitrum Foundation with $16M in RWAs, 1,740 ETH, and 230M ARB for continued operations, and to transition Arbitrum Nova into a minimized, low-cost maintenance state. Voting ends on June 4.
    • Lightchain AI DAO is voting on migrating 4.42 billion LCAI from its Ethereum-based treasury to its native Lightchain mainnet DAO treasury at a 1:1 ratio, and on approving a BitMart listing agreement and $30,000 listing fee. Voting ends on June 5 and 6.
  • Unlocks
    • June 1: SUI$0.8809 to unlock 0.36% of its circulating supply worth $12.88 million.
    • June 5: Ethena (ENA) to unlock 2.07% of its circulating supply worth $15.17 million.
    • June 6: Hyperliquid (HYPE) to unlock 2.54% of its circulating supply worth $673 million.
  • Token Launches
    • June 1: Venice (VVV) reduces token emissions by 1 million tokens per year.
    • June 1: Drift (DRIFT) to be delisted from Upbit Korea.
    • June 2: Sei (SEI) to unveil a “new blockchain revaluation framework for financial services” with Mastercard.
    • June 4: Augur hard fork deadline.

Conferences

Bitcoin, ether, solana slide as AI trade continues to rip higher

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Bitcoin, ether, solana slide as AI trade continues to rip higher

A record 10-session, $2.97 billion outflow streak from spot bitcoin ETFs and a fresh rally in oil prices on stalling U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks have kept bitcoin BTC$73,038.00 and the wider crypto market under pressure even as Wall Street’s AI trade pushed global equities to new records in Asian trading Monday.

The MSCI All Country World Index gained 0.2% on Monday and Asian equities advanced 1.1% to an all-time high, with bellwether tech indexes in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan all setting records, Bloomberg reported.

Nasdaq 100 futures rose 0.6% after Nvidia said it would enter the Windows laptop market in direct competition with Intel and AMD, and SoftBank Group jumped as much as 11% on its OpenAI and Arm holdings, putting the Japanese conglomerate on track to become the country’s most valuable listed company.

The mood was complicated by oil. Brent crude climbed above $93 a barrel as efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz showed little progress and Middle East tensions stayed elevated, sending Treasuries lower across the curve.

Crypto failed to track the equity rally. Bitcoin fell 4.6% over the past seven days to $73,397, ether (ETH) lost the same 4.6% to $1,996, solana (SOL) 3.7% to $81.89 and TRON’s TRX 3.7%, according to CoinDesk data. DOGE$0.09989 slipped 1.6%.

Spot bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. logged a tenth consecutive day of outflows on Friday, with $2.97 billion drained between May 15 and May 29, per SoSoValue data. The streak broke the previous record of eight consecutive outflow sessions set in early 2025, and was headlined by a $733 million single-day exit on May 27, the largest since January.

Total net assets across U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs fell from $104.29 billion on May 15 to $94.17 billion by Friday. Ether ETFs are running an even longer 14-session outflow streak, with roughly $2.6 billion drained from net assets over the same window.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE was the lone outlier in the top 10 by market value.

The token gained 18.7% over the past seven days to $73.17 and the U.S. spot HYPE ETF, which launched May 12, has logged inflows in every single trading session since, lifting cumulative net assets above $122 million by Friday.

Crude’s bounce above $93 and the stalled Iran deal mean the macro lift crypto was waiting on is no longer obviously coming. The ETF flows that powered last year’s rally have gone the other way for ten straight sessions.

Whitehat developer unlocks $2 million stuck in a 2016 Ethereum ICO contract for nine years

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Whitehat developer unlocks $2 million stuck in a 2016 Ethereum ICO contract for nine years

A security researcher who goes by 0xflorent worked with the team behind a 2016 Ethereum (ETH) ICO contract to unlock about $2 million in ether that had sat trapped for nine years, in a coordinated whitehat recovery that exploited an integer-overflow flaw the original developers had never patched.

The contract belongs to HongCoin, a 2016 token sale that fell short of its funding goal and was supposed to auto-refund investors’ ether but failed to do so because of a bug in the refund function.

0xflorent’s path unfroze 1,003.62 ETH, with 48 original investors now eligible to claim. Two have done so, retrieving a combined 96.5 ETH worth roughly $193,000, he said in an X thread Sunday.

The contract’s refund logic rejected any holder whose token balance exceeded a global counter that years of partial refunds had dragged down to 356, capping further refunds at 3.56 ETH.

0xflorent found that an admin function on the contract, restricted to HongCoin’s multisig wallet, lacked the integer-overflow protections later built into the Solidity programming language. Calling it with a specific input value reset a holder’s balance to one, allowing the refund check to pass and releasing the funds.

The recovery was not a unilateral exploit, however. Because the admin function required HongCoin’s multisig to execute, 0xflorent emailed the team, validated the unlock sequence on a test fork of Ethereum’s mainnet, and the team itself signed the unlock transactions.

It signed 41 transactions, one per blocked holder, freeing the roughly 1,000 ETH that was truly stuck. Another seven holders held small enough balances to refund directly without the workaround.

It is the second such recovery 0xflorent has publicized in eight days.

On May 24, he said he had returned 19.329 ETH, worth about $40,590, to its original owners, including 5.141 ETH from a failed January 2018 ICO and 14.190 ETH from seven expired atomic swaps in a Liquality Wallet user account that had become inaccessible after the wallet shut down in 2024.

The recovery lands during a heavy stretch of DeFi exploits, with April alone seeing hundreds of millions of dollars drained across protocols, headlined by a roughly $293 million hit on Kelp DAO.

Citi predicts the tokenized securities market will grow to $5.5 trillion by 2030

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Citi predicts the tokenized securities market will grow to $5.5 trillion by 2030

Putting real-world investments onchain, a process called tokenization, is moving out of the testing phase and into everyday business.

Citi’s new report Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain shared with CoinDesk ahead of Proof of Talk in Paris, shows that the global market for thse digital investments sits at just $17 billion today.

However, Citi expects this market to increase to $5.5 trillion by 2030 in its base forecast. Depending on how fast adoption take place, that could land anywhere from a low end estimate of $2.7 trillion to a bullish forecast of $8.2 trillion, Citi said.

As the report points out, this is a major turning point: “You’re seeing the full weight of American financial power and the global reserve currency moving on change at scale,” Citi says in the report. “When DTCC and the NYSE embed tokenization into capital markets, this marks a tipping point.”

According to Citi, three big shifts are driving this trillions of dollars move.

First, the traditional companies that run the world’s stock markets are building this technology directly into their regular trading systems.

In early May, Wall Street giant Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced it would start limited production trades of tokenized securities in July, with a broader launch of its platform set for October. Nasdaq is working on a framework for companies to issue blockchain-based shares with a potential launch as early as 2027. Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, also has plans for tokenized stocks.

Nasdaq also received regulatory approval to allow certain stocks to be issued and traded in this digital onchain form.

Second, the rise of trusted digital cash is providing the missing piece to make thse trades settle instantly. Standard stablecoins are expected to grow to $1.9 trillion market by 2030, working alongside digital bank deposits to allow assets and cash to swap at the exact same moment. The report expects that the growth of stablecoins alone could create about $1 trillion in new demand for U.S. government bonds, because the companies issuing stablecoins back their digital cash with these real bonds.

Third, the government rules are getting clearer, with a key piece of U.S. digital asset legislation moving forward to a full U.S. Senate vote. On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee managed to end a four-month stall with a 15-9 bipartisan approval by the committee, which advanced the Clarity Act to its next step.

The Citi report notes that the growth they forecast will happen in mainstream public markets, such as U.S. stocks and government bonds, rather than private markets, which are harder to trade and change slowly.

Citi assumes that 10% of the U.S. Treasury bill market and 3% of the U.S. public stock market will be tokenized by 2030. If just 10% of everyday U.S. investors switch to these new digital trading platforms, it would create $2.6 trillion in demand for digital stocks.

On the other side, complex areas like private credit and private equity are each expected to reach a much smaller $100 billion globally by 2030.

The shift will not happen overnight, Citi noted, saying that instead, old and new financial systems will have to run side by side for a while.

The report compares this to how highways adopted electronic toll tags like E-ZPass. Toll roads did not become fully automated in one day. Instead, states built wider roads with parallel lanes for both cash and automated drivers, which added extra cost and confusion before everyone eventually switched over to the fully automated system.

Ultimately, this new setup will give a major advantage to “Structural Orchestrators”. These are the specific big banks and investment firms that control both the real assets and the digital cash rails used to pay for them, allowing them to handle the entire trade inside their own network.

Three Sui mainnet halts in 48 hours traced to an upgrade bug by developers

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Three Sui mainnet halts in 48 hours traced to an upgrade bug by developers

A new feature shipped in Sui’s v1.72 release exposed an edge case in the Layer-1 blockchain’s gas-charging logic that halted mainnet three separate times across May 28 and May 29, with each fix either triggering or exposing the next failure, the Sui Foundation said in a post-mortem published Sunday.

The first outage began at roughly 7 a.m. PT on Thursday and lasted close to seven hours.

According to the foundation, it stemmed from a rare issue in how the network charged gas for transactions paying with a mix of the new address-balance feature and traditional coin objects. The bug caused validators to crash with an underflow error when a transaction was canceled for insufficient funds, but the gas-smashing routine still tried to spend those same funds.

Think of a coin object as a digital banknote. A user’s SUI balance isn’t a single number — it’s a stack of distinct “notes,” each with its own ID, that can be moved or combined. The wallet might hold three coin objects worth 60, 30, and 10 SUI rather than a single 100-SUI balance. To pay for something, the network combines the notes it needs.

Validators are computers (and the operators behind them) that run the network by processing transactions, voting on which ones are valid, and keeping the chain alive.

The core team brought the network back up around 1:30 p.m. PT with what it called an “interim fix” that addressed the most common version of the bug but carried “a known issue with a low probability of causing a halt.” The team accepted that risk to restore the mainnet quickly while a more robust fix was developed.

The known risk materialized the next morning. A second outage began around 5 a.m. PT on Friday, when a transaction triggered a masked variant of the same bug, in which the insufficient-funds error was overridden by another cancellation reason, bypassing the interim patch. The core team finished a more robust fix, and validators adopted it by about 9:40 a.m. PT.

The third halt was a knock-on from the second. When validators restarted to install the robust fix, validator participation in the protocol that bootstraps the network’s on-chain randomness fell below the required threshold, and randomness disabled itself as designed.

(On-chain randomness is a protocol the network uses to produce a number nobody can predict or fake, even though every validator has to agree on the same value. Apps that depend on chance — lotteries, certain games, random NFT mints — can’t run without it.)

A latent bug then failed to persist that disabled state to disk, leaving validators unaware on the next restart that randomness had been turned off. The next epoch change stalled for close to six hours as randomness-dependent transactions piled up in a paused queue.

No user funds were at risk during any of the outages, and no committed transactions were reverted, the foundation said.

SUI dropped roughly 8% during the cascade to a low of $0.90 and was trading near $0.90 on Monday, leaving the token down about 19% on the week, per CoinDesk data.

The events represent Sui’s third major reliability incident since its 2023 mainnet launch, following a two-hour transaction scheduling bug in November 2024 and a six-hour consensus divergence in January 2026.

Ripple-linked token hits 15-week low

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Ripple-linked token hits 15-week low

XRP slid to its weakest level in more than three months as heavy selling overpowered signs of exchange outflows, leaving the market stuck between two competing signals. Tokens moving off exchanges usually point to accumulation, but price action is saying sellers still have control whenever XRP tries to recover.

News Background

• More than 25 million XRP left exchanges after a large inflow earlier in the week, suggesting some investors used the drop to move tokens into longer-term storage.

• Spot XRP ETFs recorded fresh inflows, bringing cumulative flows to about $1.42 billion, though that demand has not yet been enough to reverse the downtrend.

• Leverage was heavily flushed during May, with most high-risk long positions already liquidated as XRP bounced from the $1.28 area.

Price Action Summary

• XRP dropped from $1.3384 to $1.3208, hitting a 15-week low during the session.
• The key breakdown came on 55.03 million in volume, which pushed price through support near $1.3320.
• Selling later extended toward $1.314 before a modest bounce brought XRP back toward $1.32.

Technical Analysis

• The key issue is that accumulation signals are not yet showing up in price. Exchange outflows are constructive, but XRP continues to get sold into recovery attempts.
• The breakdown below $1.3320 keeps the short-term structure weak, with $1.34 now acting as the first level buyers need to reclaim.
• A large short-liquidation cluster sits between $1.34 and $1.40, meaning a sharp move higher is possible if XRP can break back into that range.
• Until then, the tape remains defensive, with sellers still controlling the lower highs.

What traders should watch

• $1.31 is the immediate support. Losing it would put $1.28 and then $1.20 back in play.
• $1.34 is the first recovery level. A reclaim could trigger momentum toward $1.37 and $1.40.
• The setup is unstable because exchange outflows point one way while price action points the other. One side will have to give.

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