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Ethereum Price Structure ‘Weakening’ as Traders Focus on $1.8K Support

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Ethereum Price Structure ‘Weakening’ as Traders Focus on $1.8K Support

Market analysts say Ether (ETH) still faces “downside pressure” that could trigger another ETH price sell-off as traders shift their focus to support at $1,800. 

Key takeaways:

  • Ether faces downside pressure as elevated leverage and positive funding rates amid falling prices signal fragile market conditions.
  • Analysts say ETH must hold the $1,800-$1,750 support zone to avoid a deeper correction.

Ether price metrics suggest downside risks remain

Analysts have highlighted several reasons for Ether’s potential to drop lower, including an elevated estimated leveraged ratio and positive funding rates amid a “weakening price structure,” according to CryptoQuant analyst PelinayPA. 

The chart below shows that Ether’s estimated leverage ratio (yellow line) remains relatively elevated at around 0.74.

Related: Ether bears at risk of $2B squeeze as short positions build around $2K

The funding rate (blue line) has remained mostly in positive territory since mid-April, meaning long positions still dominate the market. Meanwhile, the RSI (purple line) is closer to the oversold zone at 31 and has not yet “produced a convincing recovery signal,” the analyst said in a Friday QuickTake analysis.

“Leverage remains elevated and long positioning is still dominant, yet price continues to struggle as the RSI reflects weakening momentum,” the analyst said, adding:

“Overall this combination suggests that short term downside pressure in the ETH market still remains the dominant structure.”

ETH: Funding rates and leveraged ratio

Under normal market conditions, rising leverage and increasing funding rates are usually supported by strong price expansion. However, in this case, leverage remains high while price continues to record lower lows.

“But the key signal is that this leverage build-up came alongside heavy sell-side pressure,” fellow analyst Amr Taha said in another QuickTake note. 

The chart below shows that the Binance cumulative net taker volume fell to around -$744 million, its deepest negative reading since April 6, 2026.

Amr Taha added:

“This means new leverage entered the market while aggressive sellers were still in control, making the setup more fragile than a clean bullish open-interest expansion.”

ETH: Cumulative net taker volume on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant

This suggests that the market structure is driven by derivative positioning instead of spot demand, which creates a weaker overall setup.

Waning demand is also seen in US-based spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which continue to post heavy outflows, indicating declining institutional interest. These ETFs have recorded outflows for thirteen consecutive days, totaling $695 million. The $121 million in net outflows recorded on Thursday marked the largest withdrawal in two weeks.

Spot Bitcoin Ether flows chart. Source: SoSoValue

As Cointelegraph reported, a break below the crucial $2,000 support and increased selling by whales indicate additional downside risk for ETH price in the near term.

Ether price must hold above $1,800

Ether’s 7% drop over the last three days has seen it lose the crucial $2,000 support, as the bears gained momentum.

Traders are now watching key levels on the downside, including the $1,800 demand zone.

“A good spot buy would be around $1,700-$1,800 key area,” analyst Suraj Jha said in a Friday post on X, adding:

“A confirmed breakdown below this level could shift the structure bearish and open up continuation to the downside.”

Fellow analyst Crypto Patel said Ether’s technical structure remains “bearish until we reclaim $3050.”

The ETH/USD pair “needs to hold $1,750 to keep the long-term bullish case alive,” the analyst said, adding:

“If $1,750 breaks, accumulation zone 2 sits at $,1500-$,1400, a massive discount for long-term holders.”

ETH/USD two-day chart. Source: X/CryptoPatel

A daily candlestick drop below $1,750 could trigger another sell-off episode, first toward the April 2026 low at $1,550 and later to the 2022 macro low around $1,000, as shown on the daily chart below. This would bring the total losses to 47% from the current price.

ETH/USD weekly chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

As Cointelegraph reported, after losing the psychological support at $2,000, the ETH/USD pair may then descend toward the $1,900-$1,750 zone, which buyers are expected to defend aggressively. 

U.S. regulator says 24/7 trading is great for crypto, may not be fit for other sectors

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U.S. regulator says 24/7 trading is great for crypto, may not be fit for other sectors

As global trading trends race toward 24-hour, no-days-off markets, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission argued that it may be fine for the new blockchain-native players, but that expanded hours might not be appropriate for some of the traditional markets, the derivatives watchdog said in a Friday letter issued to the wide waterfront of firms it regulates.

The advisory — coming on the same day that the agency gave a consequential green light to native crypto platforms offering perpetual futures contracts — marks what may be a growing divide between the traditional firms and the new entrants.

“Because of inherent differences between underlying markets, switching to 24/7 trading and clearing may not currently be suitable for all asset classes,” the agency wrote to its regulated exchanges and clearing operations.

“The ability to engage in, and maintain, markets on a 24/7 basis has been, in part, paralleled by evolutions in market technologies, such as blockchain networks and decentralized infrastructure, alternate forms of collateral, including stablecoins and crypto assets, and market accessibility through smartphones and associated software applications,” the CFTC noted. “With this evolution, an increasing number of platforms, with a growing list of tradeable products, are providing 24/7 access to retail and institutional participants.”However, it said, “other derivatives markets, such as in agricultural products, may be less

suited for 24/7 trading due to their unique customer bases, regional nature, and the specialized

trading and hedging practices in those markets.”

The derivatives watchdog’s primary concern is the potential for market abuse in less-observed, off-peak activity, contending that “extending trading hours to a 24/7 schedule for certain markets or products could potentially result in reduced liquidity, increased volatility, widened bid/ask spreads, and, as a result, create greater opportunities for market manipulation.”

The platforms are responsible for policing themselves as the first line of defense and “should implement additional compliance measures designed to address the unique challenges associated with expanded trading hours.”

The advisory was meant to lay out the considerations for firms looking to expand trading hours, and the CFTC urged them to communicate their plans to the agency.

The current chief of the agency, Chairman Mike Selig, has made it one of his leading priorities to embrace new technologies including crypto and prediction markets. His enthusiasm for the advances — tracking the orders and encouragement from President Donald Trump — has led to a surge in crypto policy work meant to clear a regulatory path for the industry.

One of the crypto-native firms supervised by the CFTC, Coinbase, said in a blog post on its website on Friday that it’s trying to rebuild traditional financial services atop crypto infrastructure.

“Equities, futures, and prediction markets all operate 24/7 on our platform,” the company said, noting the agency’s new allowance of global options and perps through one of its CFTC-regulated affiliates. “Today’s announcement adds the largest and most liquid category of global crypto trading to that lineup.”

BTC set to close month of May with losses

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BTC set to close month of May with losses

The most recent of the floated Middle East peace deals appears to have more legs than the dozen or so previous ones. Stocks continue to gain, bond yields are easing, and oil has fallen back to close to a three-month low.

No bit of news, though, has been able to lift crypto prices.

Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen back to $72,500 in morning U.S. trade, down about 0.5% over the past 24 hours and lower by 5.5% over the past week. Other crypto majors are posting similar declines.

Bitcoin began May at about $77,000, so absent a sizable rally over the next 60 hours, BTC will be negative for the month, ending a two-month winning streak.

Clarity Act Risks Regulation Without Oversight, Brookings Fellow Says

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Clarity Act Risks Regulation Without Oversight, Brookings Fellow Says

Latest developments: Klein argued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission faces a dramatically larger mandate as lawmakers consider expanding its authority over digital assets. Klein recently joined Rebecca Rettig and Renato Mariotti on CoinDesk’s The Policy Protocol.

  • Klein said the CFTC was originally created to oversee commodity futures markets and was not built for the scale of responsibilities envisioned under current crypto legislation.
  • He warned that giving the agency new powers without additional staff, funding and expertise could create the appearance of regulation without meaningful oversight.
  • Klein expressed concern that regulatory capacity has been weakened by personnel departures and structural changes at the agency.

What this means: The debate over the Clarity Act is increasingly becoming a debate over whether the CFTC can effectively police crypto markets.

  • Klein said one lesson from the Dodd-Frank era is that assigning major responsibilities across multiple regulators can create delays and confusion.
  • He argued that fragmented oversight risks repeating past regulatory failures if agencies lack the resources or will to enforce rules.
  • Klein compared those risks to shortcomings he believes contributed to past financial crises.

The controversy: Klein sharply criticized allegations that political influence is affecting financial regulation.

  • Referring to a New York Times report discussed during the interview, Klein said regulators should remain independent from political intervention.
  • He argued that enforcement decisions should not be influenced by relationships with the White House or political figures.
  • Klein described the current environment as unusually permissive toward financial misconduct and called for stronger accountability.

Reading between the lines: Klein sees a longer-term solution in closer coordination between U.S. market regulators.

  • He said the U.S. is unusual in maintaining separate capital markets regulators through the SEC and CFTC.
  • Klein argued that eventually merging the agencies would make sense, though he expressed skepticism that Congress is prepared to pursue that path.
  • In the meantime, he praised reports that SEC and CFTC staff may share office space, saying physical proximity can improve collaboration more than formal agreements.

What comes next: Regulatory structure could become as important as the rules themselves.

  • Klein said memorandums of understanding between agencies often fail to produce meaningful cooperation in practice.
  • He argued that stronger coordination mechanisms and operational integration would better prepare regulators for overseeing crypto and prediction markets.

Mass deployment of AI agents is a disaster waiting to happen, says CertiK CEO

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Mass deployment of AI agents is a disaster waiting to happen, says CertiK CEO

The global rush to deploy autonomous AI agents across the internet, enterprise networks and consumer applications is creating a catastrophic security debt, according to the chief of blockchain security auditor Certik.

While corporations ambitiously market these tools as productivity miracles, the crude reality is that it can be a very, very risky thing to do. Unisolated, unvetted AI agents are a massive security disaster waiting to happen, Ronghui Gu, the co-founder and CEO of CertiK, told CoinDesk.

Gu warned that users are potentially exposing their most sensitive files, local credentials and money accounts to autonomous systems that can be easily manipulated, hijacked and openly scammed.

“Right now, agents are no longer just answering questions in a chat window,” Gu told CoinDesk on the heels of CertiK’s landmark deep-dive report into widespread agent infrastructure. “They are beginning to call external tools, read local files, trigger workflows, and interact with financial infrastructure. But if you do not isolate the execution environment and scan these tools first, you are handing a compromised identity broad internal access to your entire network.”

The fundamental flaw in the current AI agent boom is a mistaken trust model, according to Gu.

Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of Cardano’s Input Output, said that by 2035 they will become more relevant than humans on the internet. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, recently said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”

Ultimate inside threat

Gu said many popular, open-source AI applications are built under the assumption that because they run locally on a user’s computer or connect via standard chat apps like WhatsApp, they are safe from external threats.

The reality is entirely the opposite, he noted. The moment a user grants an AI agent permission to read local system storage, view execution histories or manage personal email and business database credentials, that agent becomes the ultimate inside threat.

CertiK’s recent analysis of early-state, rapidly growing agent structures uncovered a staggering accumulation of security vulnerabilities, including hundreds of critical security advisories, unpatched common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and other massive exposures of local credentials and session memories resulting from completely inconsistent boundary checks.

More alarming yet is how easily these autonomous systems can be completely redirected at the reasoning layer without a single line of malicious code ever being written, Gu emphasized.

Through basic “prompt injection” attacks, a bad actor can embed hidden natural language instructions inside a benign webpage, a PDF document, or an incoming email, he added.

When the unisolated AI agent reads that file to process a task for the user, it fails to separate trusted system commands from the untrusted external data, Gu explained. The agent then silently overwrites its original rules, obeys the malicious instruction, and can be forced to exfiltrate data or trigger unauthorized fund transfers.

Hyperfast exploits

Gu revealed that CertiK discovered hundreds of malicious skills, fake installers, and lookalike dependency packages sitting directly on open agent utility hubs. Because these malicious plug-ins use standard natural language to subtly influence the agent’s behavior and change its goals, they completely bypass legacy, signature-based antivirus software.

“The scam apps use natural language to influence behavior, making them totally resistant to traditional antivirus scans,” Gu explained. “And right now, it is even easier to scam the machine than it is to scam a human.”

In what Gu describes as a bizarre evolution of financial crime, CertiK’s telemetry has observed an explosion of onchain, automated scams that run for only 10 minutes or a few hours before completely vanishing.

These hyperfast, ephemeral exploits are specifically designed by hackers to target and scam other autonomous AI trading bots and automated agent systems, executing machine-on-machine financial drainage before any human even realizes a compromise has occurred.

Gu states that the software engineering industry must completely abandon its reliance on trust-based interactions and move immediately toward an isolated, “Zero Trust” architecture where every command and dependency is continuously verified.

CFTC Seeks to Reverse Gemini Settlement

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CFTC Seeks to Reverse Gemini Settlement

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has asked a federal court to vacate its $5 million settlement with crypto exchange Gemini, claiming that the agency’s enforcement action was based on flawed allegations.

Gemini settled with the CFTC and paid a $5 million fine in January 2025 in the final weeks of the Biden administration after the agency accused it of making false or misleading statements related to a Bitcoin futures contract.

The CFTC filed a joint motion with Gemini in a Manhattan court on Wednesday seeking to vacate the settlement, adding in a statement that it had reviewed the matter and concluded that the “complaint should not have been filed — and would not have been under current enforcement standards.”

The CFTC said the complaint, brought under the Biden administration, was “largely based on a whistleblower’s account known to be lacking in credibility.” 

“Accordingly, the CFTC determined that continuing enforcement of the consent order’s prospective provisions serves neither the CFTC’s mission nor the public interest,” it said.

Source: CFTC

The CFTC’s request adds to a string of crypto lawsuits and investigations that the agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission have abandoned under US President Donald Trump.

Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss each donated $1 million to Trump’s election campaign in 2024.

The CFTC’s motion comes after Trump’s former CFTC chair nominee, Brian Quintenz, in September shared on X messages from Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss, who asked if he would review the agency’s case against the company if he were made chair.

Trump later withdrew Quintenz’s nomination and instead backed Mike Selig, a former lawyer for crypto companies who has taken a supportive stance toward the crypto industry.

The CFTC’s request seeks to end ongoing obligations imposed on Gemini under the settlement, including an injunction barring it from making false or misleading statements to the agency. 

“Applying the remaining provisions — including injunctive relief — prospectively would not be equitable,” the agency said.

Gemini already paid a $5 million fine as part of that settlement, and a CFTC spokesperson told Cointelegraph that Gemini won’t be refunded the penalty “regardless of what happens with the motion.”

The case stemmed from allegations that Gemini made misleading statements in 2022 during the review of a Bitcoin futures contract, particularly regarding its auction volumes and liquidity. 

The CFTC said these claims were relevant to assessing risk and the contract’s approval. 

Related: CME Group to launch regulated Bitcoin volatility futures 

The CFTC’s complaint relied on allegations from a whistleblower in 2017, who claimed that Gemini inflated trading activity and volumes to distort user demand.

The agency argued in its latest filing that the whistleblower’s allegations were based on statements from Gemini’s former chief operating officer and a subordinate, who allegedly made threats against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and was allegedly known to lie about material facts.

The CFTC also argued that Gemini was a victim of fraud, claiming that two customers exploited Gemini’s “preferential fee structures through a coordinated rebate-fraud scheme.”

It also alleged that the two customers admitted defrauding Gemini of $7.5 million through this scheme, but the past leadership “did nothing with those admissions.”

Cointelegraph contacted Gemini for comment.

Magazine: eToro founder timed Bitcoin top perfectly due to belief in 4 year cycles

U.S. CFTC opens crypto ‘perp’ door with first approval at regulated firm

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U.S. CFTC opens crypto ‘perp’ door with first approval at regulated firm

U.S. crypto firms can offer perpetual futures contracts, or “perps,” without running afoul of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to the agency’s first approval allowing Kalshi to list and trade U.S. bitcoin perpetuals, the regulator said on Friday.

In a related action, the agency also issued key guidance that allowed Coinbase Financial Markets to put its U.S. clients into global options and perps, tapping the largest current markets.

The perp is a kind of derivative that allows the investor to speculate on future price movements in a crypto asset without putting an expiration date on that contract, allowing it to be held as long as the investor wants. With this first approval on a registered platform, the U.S. derivatives regulator with a long history overseeing traditional crypto futures now opens a U.S. path for the potentially lucrative and popular arena of crypto perps that have previously been pursued more in non-U.S. jurisdictions.

The CFTC announced Kalshi is approved for the first true bitcoin-referenced perp, BTCPERP, and the agency said the approval “requires, among other terms and conditions, that Kalshi list and maintain the BTCPERP Contract in compliance with all applicable provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act.” While Kalshi is best known in the public as a leading prediction markets platform, the registered exchange has been expanding its business footprint.

“This marks Kalshi’s evolution from prediction market leader to next-gen derivatives exchange,” said Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, in a post on the company’s website that called their event contract business only the first chapter. “Onshore, safe and regulated perps will improve capital allocation and risk management for countless American businesses.”

In a no-action letter sent to Coinbase on the same day, the CFTC said it would not recommend an enforcement action for certain perpetual futures products that Coinbase intends to list through its CFM subsidiary. These perpetual futures will be routed through Coinbase Bermuda, so they’ll be treated as “foreign futures.” The no-action letter will allow CFM to post customers’ digital assets (including bitcoin, ether and stablecoins) as margin collateral for these products.

Paul Grewal, Coinbase chief legal officer, called it a “massive first for the industry” in a post on social media site X.

The CFTC announcements follow closely on the heels of President Donald Trump’s social-media post this week that cited perpetuals and argued that the previous administration’s regulators “nearly DESTROYED the American Crypto Industry by driving Bitcoin, Crypto Perpetuals, and INNOVATION offshore, but ‘TRUMP’ SAVED IT.”

Trump’s CFTC chairman, Mike Selig, argued that the contracts represent “a foundational risk management and price discovery tool in the global crypto asset markets.”

“Having true perpetual contracts in the United States is a major step forward in delivering on President Trump’s goal of cementing America as the crypto capital of the world,” Selig wrote in an opinion piece published Friday at CoinDesk. He said his agency is now providing “a workable framework for true crypto asset perpetual contracts.”

Perps, typically amplified with leverage, can be a way to cash in big on even minor price movements in assets such as bitcoin BTC$72,586.61 and Ethereum’s ether (ETH), but that also means they can go the other direction just as sharply, making them a volatile investment.

Selig had said in March that he has been trying to repair damage from the previous U.S. administration that “drove a lot of these firms and the liquidity offshore.” Some of the other crypto-native exchanges the agency oversees in the U.S. include Bitnomial (just acquired by Kraken) and Gemini, plus Kalshi’s prediction-market rival, Polymarket.

Selig wrote on Friday that his agency’s approach to perps would “limit excessive leverage, volatility and systemic risk.”

There are other dangers associated with perpetuals, too, as witnessed this week with the flash crash in the Hyperliquid SPACEX-USDH, a crypto perpetual contract for SpaceX’s market valuation, catching many investors off-guard and wiping out some $1.5 million in notional value within 30 minutes because of one outsized position that absorbed the market’s thin liquidity.

The CFTC’s new stance doesn’t yet carry the weight of a formal rule. The CFTC and its sister agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, have been blazing a crypto policy trail with new statements, no-action letters, approvals and guidance revealing their current stance on various aspects of the industry. But until the policies are set with formal rules or — even more durable — new laws, then they can be easily overturned by future agency leaders.

In March, the two agencies released highly consequential guidance that — for the first time — offered their definitions for classifying various crypto assets. The new taxonomy described a series of buckets the assets could be placed in that would establish how they’d be regulated and by whom, and it also set out standards for how a crypto security may eventually transition out of that classification as its project matures.

The SEC is also poised to release a wide-reaching new crypto policy meant to pave the way for the tokenization of securities by offering temporary exemptions from registration for digital asset innovations. The shift — a marquee project for SEC Chairman Paul Atkins — is planned as an interim measure to foster crypto activity while the industry awaits a more permanent law from Congress.

Read More: CFTC chief Selig to clear path for U.S. perpetual futures in coming weeks

UPDATE (May 29, 2026, 14:17 UTC): Adds identification of the approved firm, Kalshi, and the addition of no-action guidance involving Coinbase.
UPDATE (May 29, 2026, 14:30 UTC): Adds remarks from Kalshi.

UPDATE (May 29, 2026, 14:44 UTC): Adds detail and remarks from Coinbase.

Why is Stellar’s XLM up by Over 50% This Week?

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Why is Stellar’s XLM up by Over 50% This Week?

Stellar’s native token, XLM, has rallied more than 50% this week, outperforming the broader crypto market, which has declined by nearly 5% in the same period.

Key takeaways:

  • US financial giant DTCC announced it would integrate its tokenized securities platform with the Stellar Network.
  • XLM rallied by over 50% after the announcement, but risks a sharp downside in the coming weeks.

DTCC partnership fuels XLM rally

XLM’s price surged after a major institutional partnership announcement by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a US financial giant that clears and settles $10 trillion to $12 trillion in securities transactions daily.

In a Wednesday press release, the firm revealed plans to integrate its tokenized securities platform with the Stellar network, targeting a launch in the first half of 2027.

XLM/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView

The move builds on DTCC’s tokenized trades, launched in July 2026, based on its multi-chain strategy for tokenized asset issuance, reporting, corporate actions, and settlement.

XLM rallied 51.75% after the DTCC announcement and traded for as high as $0.224 on Friday, its highest level since January. Trading volumes rose sharply alongside the upside move, suggesting that many buyers stepped in.

Short squeeze helped fuel XLM price rally

A crowded short trade appears to have also amplified the XLM upside move. Since May 28, Stellar’s short liquidations have reached $12.41 million, compared with $6.82 million in long liquidations, according to CoinGlass.

Stellar total liquidations chart vs. XLM price. Source: CoinGlass

That means bearish traders suffered nearly 1.8 times more forced closures than bullish traders as XLM surged from around $0.15 to as high as $0.224.

XLM open interest nearly doubled during the same period, reaching $292.11 million on Friday. That shows traders added heavy leverage as the rally unfolded, instead of simply closing positions.

Stellar open interest vs. XLM price. Source: CoinGlass

At the same time, XLM’s OI-weighted funding rate dropped to around -0.0270%, its deepest level since April, even as the price climbed.

Stellar’s OI-weighted funding rate vs. XLM price. Source: CoinGlass

Negative funding means short traders paid long traders to keep their positions open, showing that bearish positioning remained crowded during the breakout.

When the price rises against heavily leveraged shorts, exchanges force bearish traders to buy back the token to close their trades. That forced buying adds fresh upward pressure, leading to a “short squeeze.”

XLM’s PayPal and Trump rallies raise sharp pullback risks

Stellar’s latest breakout mirrors earlier XLM rallies that ended with steep corrections.

In November 2024, XLM surged by roughly 640% after Donald Trump’s re-election as the US president. However, the rally quickly lost momentum, with XLM later dropping by about 68.6% from its local peak.

XLM/USD two-week chart. Source: TradingView

A similar pattern played out in July 2025, when PayPal’s stablecoin launch on Stellar and growing excitement around the Protocol 23 upgrade helped XLM rally by around 140%.

However, the upside was short-lived, with the XLM/USD pair later correcting by roughly 73.8%.

The risk now is that the DTCC-driven rally follows the same pattern.

XLM is running hard into long-term resistance

XLM’s latest rally has pushed the token into a major long-term resistance zone, raising the risk of a pullback or consolidation.

As of Friday, XLM was trading near the $0.198–$0.224 ceiling area, and a zone that also overlaps with three exponential moving averages (EMA), namely the 50-week EMA (red) near $0.2216, 100-week EMA (purple) near $0.2281 and 200-week EMA (blue) near $0.2083.

XLM/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView

Failure to break above the resistance confluence, which analyst MAGIC called “too strong for the first test,” risks sending the XLM price toward the $0.112–$0.136 area, down 30%–40% from current levels, by June or July.

The downside target area aligns with the lower trendline of XLM’s prevailing descending channel pattern.

Related: Altseason is dead, expect shorter cycles and ‘violent’ rotations: Crypto exec

Conversely, a decisive breakout above the resistance area raises the odds of XLM rallying toward the channel’s upper boundary near the $0.28–$0.30 range by June or July. That’s up roughly 40% from the current price levels.

Bittensor (TAO) drops 4%, leading index lower

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Bittensor (TAO) drops 4%, leading index lower

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1975.1, down 0.8% (-14.99) since 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.

Three of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: NEAR (+1%) and HBAR (+0.5%).

Laggards: TAO (-4%) and ICP (-3.8%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Memecoin Platform DxSale Drained for $7.3M Across 1,400 LPs

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Memecoin Platform DxSale Drained for $7.3M Across 1,400 LPs

Memecoin launch platform DxSale was drained of $7.3 million in funds in a cyberattack that affected around 1,400 liquidity providers (LPs) on the BNB Chain. 

The attacker’s address “0xC457” transferred $1.87 million worth of BNB (BNB) tokens into two main wallets and subsequently deposited them into multiple Binance deposit addresses, according to blockchain data platform PeckShield in a Friday X post.

Back in 2021, DxSale was used to lock in liquidity for tokens launched on the BNB Chain. Blockchain analyst Tahax estimated that the locker still holds liquidity from projects launched years ago and explained that the exploiter wallet was freshly created and funded through crypto exchange Bybit.

The exploit adds to the renewed concerns around decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks, which have stolen $52 million so far in May, down from $634 million in April, which marked an over one-year high last seen in February 2025, according to data aggregator DefiLlama.

Mounting cyberattacks have led to widespread concerns about whether the wider DeFi sector is unsafe, partly due to the growing use of AI by malicious actors. “I now consider *all* of DeFi unsafe,” Manuel Aráoz, founder of the blockchain security platform OpenZeppelin, said on Tuesday, citing AI’s growing ability to identify smart contract vulnerabilities.

Source: PeckShield

DxSale stolen funds are already untraceable: onchain analyst

The attacker has already moved some funds through infrastructure that may make tracing more difficult, according to Tahax.

The analyst said that the DxSale deployer quietly transferred ownership of the locker contract to a new wallet 269 days ago, alleging that a “backdoor was left in” without an official migration announcement.

Source: Tahax

The analyst pointed to onchain evidence of another 80 transactions that executed subsequent ownership hops for obfuscation, before contract ownership landed at wallet ‘0xC45,’ which started the mass BNB withdrawals.

Related: Mystery Bitcoin burn destroys 107 BTC worth about $8.5M

The backdoor in the deployer contract, paired with a backdated lock, enabled the hacker to exploit withdrawal loops and extract the BNB tokens, wrote Web3 security platform Coinsult, in a Friday X post, adding:

“A privileged setFee plus a backdated lock turned ‘locked’ deposits into a withdrawable balance.”

Cointelegraph has approached DxSale for comment on the exploit and the final number of affected liquidity providers.

The exploit adds to more than $17 billion in crypto exploit losses tracked by DefiLlama, including about $7.8 billion from DeFi protocols.

Magazine: Agent wastes 14 hours of scammers’ time, LLMs ‘poisoned’ by Iran: AI Eye

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