Home Blog Page 210

MiCA Architect Says EU Should Prioritize Tokenization Over DeFi Rules

info@uweb3.io
-
0
MiCA Architect Says EU Should Prioritize Tokenization Over DeFi Rules

The European Union should focus on a broader digital asset framework covering real-world assets and tokenization instead of regulating decentralized finance through a second version of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), an adviser at the European Commission said.

The European Commission launched a public consultation on MiCA in May, seeking feedback through Aug. 31.

“I do not believe that [MiCA] is outdated now. That’s my personal opinion, but it does not matter. That’s why we have this consultation,” Peter Kerstens told Cointelegraph during a fireside chat at WAIB Summit Monaco 2026.

Kerstens, one of MiCA’s architects, said that the feedback received during the European Commission’s current review period will help shape the bloc’s next regulatory steps.

MiCA is approaching the end of its transitional period on July 1, after which crypto asset service providers will be required to hold a MiCA license or stop servicing EU clients.

Related: Crypto firms face July 1 EU cutoff as MiCA grace period ends

EU doesn’t need to regulate DeFi, says MiCA architect

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols were included among the emerging risk areas examined in the consultation, even though they are largely outside MiCA’s current scope.

An excerpt from the public consultation on the MiCA review. Source: European Commission

However, Kerstens said regulating DeFi would be difficult because laws can be applied to people and organizations, but not directly to computer networks. He said lawmakers would need a new legal doctrine to regulate non-entities.

Kerstens added that he doesn’t see a need to regulate DeFi, which he described as a “movement” that has “no representatives.”

“I don’t see what the problem is. And if there is no problem, why should it be regulated?”

Earlier in March, a working paper from the European Central Bank questioned whether decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are decentralized enough to remain outside MiCA’s scope. Looking at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap, the paper found that the top 100 governance token holders controlled over 80% of the supply in each protocol, based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023.

The authors said these findings question whether DAOs are inherently decentralized and whether they should remain outside of the MiCA regulation as “fully decentralized” services.

Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

Humanity’s $36 million exploit happened because a ‘multisig’ lived on one laptop

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Humanity’s $36 million exploit happened because a ‘multisig’ lived on one laptop

Humanity Protocol explained how attackers were able to steal more than $36 million of its H token, and the cause was a serious lapse in how it secured its keys.

In an incident update shared with CoinDesk, the decentralized identity project said the breach started when an employee’s laptop was compromised. The machine held several keys that controlled the project’s token bridges, the tools that move H (and other tokens) between blockchains.

Those bridges ran through multisignature wallets, which require a number of separate keys to approve any change. A multisignature wallet is supposed to spread keys across different people and devices so that no single machine can move funds.

In this case, all the keys were stored on a single device, meaning a compromise allowed the exploier to cross the approval threshold on both chains, Humanity said.

The attacker obtained three of the six keys controlling the bridge’s admin account on Ethereum, enough to seize controls linked to the project’s deployment on the network.

The attacker then transferred ownership to their own wallet, swapped the bridge’s code for a malicious version and drained about 141 million H in one transaction.

In a Telegram message to CoinDesk, Humanity founder Terence Kwok said the team had set up a multisig wallet across four individuals (as it should have).

Humanity suspects that “some of the keys were accidentally backed up to a compromised device during setup,” Kwok said. “We use a licensed custodian for the majority of token treasury, mpc for operations treasury, and for certain contracts multisig keys were set up in one place and then dispersed.

“Unfortunately in this scenario, the keys were backed up on a compromised device,” he said.

The attacker executed similar steps on BNB Chain with three of five keys. This time, installing code with an unlimited mint function, which allowed the creation of tokens at will, and minted about 200 million new H straight to their wallet.

Humanity has since removed the team page from its website. The project said it has halted deposits and withdrawals on the affected bridges and is working with exchanges and the police to recover funds.

Humanity raised $20 million from Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto last year at a $1.1 billion valuation.

ZachXBT, a prominent onchain investigator, said the key compromise and a separate round of suspicious market-making in the token were not connected.

He also raised questions about how the token traded in the weeks before the breach, ahead of a large scheduled token unlock, as H token prices shot up from 20 cents to 70 cents within two weeks.

The token has clawed back some of the lost ground. After falling as low as about 5 cents during the attack, it recovered to around 20 cents, according to CoinGecko data. It remains well below the roughly pre-breach level of 67 cents.

Wall Street will run entirely on the blockchain by 2030, says Brickken CEO

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Wall Street will run entirely on the blockchain by 2030, says Brickken CEO

The line between traditional finance (TradFi) and crypto is disappearing, with tokenization consistently a dominant narrative of the digital asset industry for a number of years.

Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, projects that Wall Street will run entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Mata told CoinDesk that tech industry buzzwords like “Web3” are fading as major banks adopt the technology for standard financial plumbing, such as settlements and payments.

“The merge between Wall Street and technology is going to dissipate,” Mata said in an interview. “We’re not going to talk anymore about blockchain. It’s merging into fintech.”

While institutional interest in tokenizing real-world assets is growing, driven by major moves like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Mata warned that Europe is over-regulating itself out of the race.

This push toward blockchain-native infrastructure was highlighted by Bullish’s (BLSH) $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti. The deal targets corporate shareholder recordkeeping to ensure shares are issued and recorded directly on-chain from the start, rather than using synthetic digital “wrappers.” Bullish is also the parent company of CoinDesk.

The next shift for tokenization will not be driven by humans, but by software, Mata said. Brickken, a Barcelona, Spain-based tokenization platform that has served as a pathway for bringing $500 million of real-world assets onchain, is currently integrating AI agents to automate the onboarding of assets and the sourcing of liquidity for its 200 clients. .

Mata predicts that traditional software dashboards will soon be replaced by simple chat prompts, where AI agents handle the backend work of finding the best financial yields.

“The decision-maker is not going to be us anymore. It’s going to be AI,” Mata said.

Mata also criticized the European Union’s MiCA regulatory framework, which he said protects legacy banks by imposing expensive, slow-moving compliance rules on small startups.

“Smaller players cannot access the market, which creates a moat for the bigger players,” Mata said. “It can take you nine months [to get a license], and if you’re a startup, nine months without monetizing, you’re dead.”

Startups may choose to move to the UAE and Southeast Asia rather than tackle these steep barriers. Mata believes the U.S. will remain the main powerhouse for crypto innovation simply because it controls the world’s largest capital market, rendering current regulatory disputes in Washington temporary noise.

France-based Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet shared Mata’s criticism. He told CoinDesk the EU’s regulatory framework has transformed the competitive landscape of Web3, unintendedly affecting crypto startups, and instead hugely benefiting legacy financial institutions

Read More: Abra’s Bill Barhydt says Wall Street’s next crypto bet is tokenization

Autonomous AI Agents Pose Crypto Financial Risks

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Autonomous AI Agents Pose Crypto Financial Risks

Artificial intelligence agents that have autonomous access to crypto wallets could become unstoppable if deployed maliciously or if they escape from sandboxes, experts from a leading academic research consortium warned.

“Unstoppable Autonomous Agents” (UAAs) pose a clear threat if they are deployed to persist automatically and have access to digital assets, according to a June 8 industry review written by 25 academics and experts from top US universities for the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).

“When combined systematically, crypto tools can channel AI’s fluid power into secure, reliable, and highly autonomous systems,” the researchers wrote. However, this combination could have “far-reaching consequences for users and the financial system,” they added. 

UAAs may also be equipped with access to cryptocurrency wallets, social media accounts, APIs, and other external tools, said the researchers.

“The capabilities enabling such agents are already emerging and improving rapidly.” 

The warning comes as crypto projects and executives have been pushing the agentic payment and micropayment economy narrative this year, suggesting it could be the biggest use case for decentralized digital assets. 

AI self-replication alarm bells

The paper also revealed that existing models can already “surpass self-replication red lines” in local environments, by autonomously creating a live, separate copy of themselves on the same machine, “a capability that could let a system evade shutdown and proliferate.”

Because reward signals used in training often fail to perfectly capture the intended objectives, “UAAs deployed for benign purposes may inadvertently cause harm,” or pursue resource acquisition as a default strategy, they said. 

However, the authors noted that models have yet to replicate themselves onto external infrastructure.

Potential AI agent insider trading advantages 

A fleet of self-replicating, resource-acquiring agents could also create unpredictable demand and liquidity dynamics in crypto markets. 

“AI-powered trading systems could enable collusion between autonomous agents and create unfair insider advantages through opaque strategies.”

Related: China already has compute to train its own Mythos-like AI: Nvidia CEO

The tech sector is already dealing with difficult questions about the threat of unmitigated AI. 

Models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos have already been shown to be capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems. 

Meanwhile, Gartner warned in late May that governance failures around autonomous AI agents could trigger widespread enterprise failures, predicting 40% of companies will be forced to decommission their agents by 2027. 

“The harms that could follow from fully autonomous agents of this kind are severe,” the researchers said, suggesting circuit breaker guardrails.

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-director and Chainlink Labs chief scientist, presents the paper at ETHConf. Source: IC3

Magazine: Vietnam preps crypto pilot, HK pushes tokenization: Asia Express

BTC price bounce is no bullish revival, with anything from $68,000 to $80,000 seen as a marker: Crypto Daily

info@uweb3.io
-
0
BTC price bounce is no bullish revival, with anything from $68,000 to $80,000 seen as a marker: Crypto Daily

Bitcoin BTC$63,271.85 has carved out a relief bounce after plunging below $60,000 on Friday, but a bounce and a bullish revival are two very different things. The latter hinges on a couple of key price levels, according to analysts.

“The market has become oversold enough for sharp relief rallies, especially if inflation data softens and ETF outflows slow,” analysts at HEX Trust said in an email. “But the difference between a relief rally and a regime shift is acceptance … BTC needs [to retake] $79k-$80k.”

In other words, anything below $80,000 would be seen as a corrective bounce within the broader bear market that began last year. Only a move beyond that would signal the beginning of a new advance.

Their stance may be overly cautious, according to some observers.

“Technically, a recovery up to $68K could be viewed as a rebound from the downward momentum seen between 11 May and 5 June,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, the chief analyst at FxPro, hinting at a lower price level to beat for the bulls.

A rally even to these levels hinges on ETF flows and macro factors. The 11 spot bitcoin ETFs listed in the U.S. have processed redemptions over $5 billion in the past four weeks. On Monday, investors yanked another $91 million, according to data source SoSoValue.

These outflows need to meaningfully reverse for the bitcoin price to gain upward momentum. In addition, Wednesday’s U.S. inflation data may have to come in softer than expected, easing concerns the Fed will raise interest rates. The data is expected to show the cost of living topped 4% in May, well above the Fed’s 2% goal.

“The constructive path is conditional: inflation softens, Treasury yields stabilize, AI equities stop de-risking, BTC/ETH ETF outflows slow, and the market reclaims the key technical levels. Until then, the conclusion is deliberately simple: below the reclaim, there is no regime shift,” Hex Trust said. 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.”

What’s trending

Today’s signal

BTC’s price chart with the MACD histogram. (TradingView)

The chart shows bitcoin’s hourly price swings in candlestick format along with the MACD histogram in the lower pane, which shows trend changes and strength.

Prices are currently trading close to a trendline, which represents the mini-bounce from Friday’s low. A break of this trendline would mark the end of the bounce and open the path for a potential test of recent lows.

The negative MACD histogram suggests bearish momentum is strong, meaning the trendline support may not last long.

Strategy’s (MSTR) bitcoin purchase fails to stir BTC price: Crypto Markets Today

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Strategy’s (MSTR) bitcoin purchase fails to stir BTC price: Crypto Markets Today

The recovery in bitcoin BTC$63,271.85 stalled Tuesday even after Strategy (MSTR) bought more of the largest cryptocurrency following its end-May sale.

Bitcoin was recently trading near $62,600, little changed from Monday. This follows Sunday’s 4% bounce, which briefly took prices above $64,000 on some exchanges, including Coinbase.

Strategy, the largest publicly listed bitcoin holder, said Monday it had bought 1,550 BTC for $101 million, bringing its total stockpile to 845,256 coins. While that’s about 48 times the 32 BTC it sold in the final days of May, the purchase failed to stir the token’s price.

BTC’s immobility isn’t doing any good to the broader market either. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index has dropped 1.8% in 24 hours and the CoinDesk 80 Index is down 1.3%.

The mood clearly remains risk-averse, with investors lacking conviction to chase upside.

“Bitcoin’s recent rebound shows there is still demand when prices pull back, but investors are not committing capital with the same level of confidence we saw earlier in the year,” Daniel Reis-Faria, CEO of ZeroStack, said in an email.

“While a lot of attention has been placed on Strategy’s buying activity, the bigger factor remains the broader economic environment. Investors are paying close attention to inflation and interest rate expectations ahead of next week’s FOMC meeting, as these factors influence how much risk they’re willing to take across all asset classes, including crypto,” Reis-Faria said.

Derivatives positioning

  • Total crypto futures volume slipped 1.3% to $190.7 billion in 24 hours while open interest held largely flat around $103 billion. Liquidations crashed 48% to $301 million, a sign that the most aggressive leverage has already been flushed from the system.
  • ZEC is the standout in futures markets. Open interest has climbed roughly 5% to 2.47 million tokens, the highest since May 26, as the token trades at $472, sharply recovering from lows under $300 last week.
  • Its 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) is positive, meaning buyers are driving price action with market orders rather than passive limit orders. The catch is that annualized perpetual funding rates remain deeply negative at around -45%, meaning shorts are still firmly in control of positioning. That sets up a potential short squeeze should prices continue rising, as bears face mounting costs to hold their positions.
  • Open interest in WLD remains just shy of last week’s record 963.6 million tokens, signaling elevated positioning and heightened potential for price volatility. Bitcoin and ether open interest are steady near Monday levels.
  • The 24-hour CVD for most major coins, including bitcoin and ether, is negative, meaning bears are leading price action across the broader market.
  • BVIV and EVIV — bitcoin and ether’s 30-day implied volatility indexes — continue their retreats from Friday’s highs, suggesting panic is ebbing. But front-week implied volatility in both is sharply elevated, pointing to heightened expectations around Wednesday’s U.S. CPI release.
  • On Deribit, the $60,000 put remains a focal point and is among the most actively traded strikes across multiple expiries in the past 24 hours. The one-week risk reversal is heavily skewed toward puts, with BTC puts trading at an 8 vol point premium to calls, a persistent signal that fears of a deeper price selloff have not gone away.

Token talk

  • Humanity Protocol’s H token crashed more than 80% after attackers stole the private keys — the secret codes that control crypto wallets — of a Humanity Foundation member and drained more than $32 million from about 17 wallets, with losses still climbing.
  • The token fell from about $0.67 to near $0.13 and briefly touched $0.05, a 24-hour drop of roughly 90%.
  • The theft is still in progress. The attacker has been selling the stolen H for ether and minted another 100 million H, worth about $11 million, on BNB Chain, pointing to more selling pressure ahead.
  • Humanity, a palm-scan identity project that pitches itself as a rival to WLD$0.5038, told users to stop touching its bridge and liquidity pools while it works with security firms and exchanges.
  • The attack fits the dominant 2026 pattern of thieves going after keys rather than code. Solana’s Drift lost about $285 million in April after attackers seized an administrative key, and Kelp DAO lost roughly $292 million the same month through a single-validator bridge.
  • Sahara AI’s SAHARA fell about 60% to roughly $0.016, near its all-time low of $0.01355. About $215 million changed hands against a market cap near $49 million, turnover more than four times the token’s size and the mark of a capitulation event.
  • Unlike Humanity, Sahara said there were no security issues with its contracts or products, the same line it posted verbatim on Nov. 29, 2025, when the token fell from about 7 cents to 4 cents. It blamed a pre-scheduled 600 million token transfer to its Chainlink cross-chain bridge and said team and investor allocations are untouched on-chain.
  • SAHARA is now down roughly 75% since its June 2025 debut.

Bitcoin Futures Reset As Buyers Step In Near $59K

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Bitcoin Futures Reset As Buyers Step In Near $59K

Bitcoin (BTC) rallied toward $64,000 on Monday, but futures market activity was lagging, which may be a sign that the rebound could lose momentum. Traders placed nearly $162 million in buy orders between $57,000 and $59,000, forming one of the largest visible liquidity clusters below the current pricing, potentially setting the stage for BTC’s next move. 

Bitcoin rebound follows a leverage reset

Bitcoin’s recovery coincided with a decline in futures market activity. Futures data shows that the aggregated open interest fell to 255,000 BTC from 282,000 BTC during the selloff and even though Bitcoin has recovered from its drop to $59,000, the open interest remains well below last week’s peak.

BTC price, spot and futures CVD and funding rate. Source: Velo chart

The funding rate has also turned slightly positive at 0.0013 after briefly dipping below zero. The move shows futures traders are leaning long, but leverage remains relatively muted compared with levels seen before the decline.

Spot market activity is also a minor sign of stabilization. The aggregated spot cumulative volume delta (CVD), which tracks the balance between aggressive buyers and sellers, has improved by 11,000 BTC since last Friday. The shift points to a slowdown in aggressive selling after several weeks of persistent distribution.

Crypto trader Max Trades reached a similar conclusion, noting that open interest cooled noticeably during the bounce while funding flipped slightly positive. According to the analyst, the move appears to be driven in part by short positions being closed rather than aggressive new longs entering the market.

Likewise, Alphractal CEO Joao Wedson said Bitcoin has exited an “extreme leverage” phase and moved into moderate leverage territory following last week’s liquidations. 

Wedson added that the market has not yet reached historical levels associated with extreme deleveraging, a zone that has often offered stronger accumulation opportunities.

Bitcoin: leverage pressure zone. Source: CryptoQuant

Related: Bitcoin price $60K support not yet safe as more macro headwinds stack up

BTC liquidity clusters below $60,000

Data shows that the dip buyers have placed approximately 2,565 BTC in bid liquidity between $57,000 and $59,000. At current prices near $63,300, those buy orders are worth $162 million.

Bid liquidity refers to limit buy orders waiting below the market price. If Bitcoin trades into those levels, the orders may absorb selling pressure and support a rebound if demand outweighs available supply.

BTC bid liquidity below $60,000. Source: Velo Chart

Market analyst exitpump highlighted a similar concentration on Binance’s spot order book, noting that the thick liquidity below $60,000 may lead to consolidation and further open interest resets.

Meanwhile, trader LP NXT pointed to a six-week pattern in which Monday pivot highs and lows have consistently been followed by the opposite pivot on Wednesday. A Monday high has typically preceded a midweek low and relief rally, while a Monday low has often led to a Wednesday high and renewed price weakness. 

The streak currently stands at six-for-six, placing additional focus on this week’s midweek price action as Bitcoin trades between the support liquidity below $60,000 and resistance near $64,000.

BTC trend analysis by LP. Source: X

Related: ‘Best thesis’ for Bitcoin accumulation surfaces despite current downside risk: Analyst

Bitcoin can drop to $30,000 but Strategy won’t sell, BTC miner says

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Bitcoin can drop to $30,000 but Strategy won’t sell, BTC miner says

Bitcoin BTC$63,271.85 can drop down to $30,000 but still won’t impact Strategy’s BTC plans.

That’s from Jiang Zhuoer, chief executive of BTC.TOP, one of China’s largest bitcoin mining pools, who shared on X that Strategy is unlikely to sell much of its bitcoin, pushing back on a week of speculation that the company offloaded coins to meet its obligations.

The talk built after an on-chain analyst estimated that about 45,000 bitcoin, worth roughly $3 billion, left a Fidelity custody wallet between May 28 and June 1, and suggested Strategy had sold the coins gradually at an average near $66,000.

That wallet also holds Fidelity’s bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds, so tying the outflow to Strategy is an inference rather than a confirmed sale. Jiang, writing on Sunday (in Mandarin), called the speculation overblown.

His case rests on Strategy’s balance sheet. The company’s debt equals only about 5% of its assets, he said, and would climb to just 10% even if bitcoin fell to $30,000 from around $62,900 now. He sees little reason for the company to break the never-sell-bitcoin image that underpins its market story.

Jiang also defended the logic behind STRC, the preferred shares Strategy sells to raise cash, which pay an 11.5% annual dividend in monthly installments.

Selling its oldest and cheapest bitcoin lets Strategy book an accounting profit that can fund those payments, he argued, while money raised from new STRC sales buys fresh bitcoin.

As long as purchases outpace sales, Strategy stays a net buyer. The bigger point, he said, is that STRC holders’ main fear was that Strategy would refuse to sell bitcoin and default on the dividend, so signaling it is willing to sell actually removes that worry.

Others in the discussion were less convinced, arguing that a long bear market would swell Strategy’s interest bill and force larger bitcoin sales no matter what management intends.

Bitcoin traded near $63,400 on Monday, according to CoinDesk data, down nearly 10% in the past week after Strategy reported its first bitcoin sale since 2022.

BTC above $63,000 as some peg SpaceX’s IPO as ‘next catalyst’

info@uweb3.io
-
0
BTC above $63,000 as some peg SpaceX’s IPO as ‘next catalyst’

For all the focus on bitcoin’s order flow, the event that decides the next move might just be sitting in equities.

Major market-maker Wintermute said in a Tuesday note that a catalyst for bitcoin and the broader crypto market is SpaceX’s stock market debut on June 12.

The listing is gauge of retail and risk appetite. If investors absorb the deal well, it reads as a good sign for crypto. Wintermute said, that points to exhaustion across risk assets and would be bearish for the whole complex.

Wintermute said last week’s drop was about a missing bid, not Strategy’s bitcoin sale.

On its over-the-counter desk, where large trades happen off exchanges, retail had been selling for a while and moving into stocks. US institutions were offloading the bitcoin they bought a month ago.

Wintermute added some of the recent selling in AI stocks looks like investors raising cash for a run of huge IPOs, with SpaceX first. The money going into those deals has to come from somewhere, and right now some of it is leaving crypto and tech.

There is also no chart to lean on, however. Bitcoin never traded much between $50,000 and $59,000 on the way up in 2024, so there are no real support levels underneath.

Bitcoin traded near $63,000 on Tuesday, according to CoinDesk data, down about 14% over the past week. SpaceX prices on June 11 and begins trading the next day.

USDT’s dominance rate flashed a golden cross, which may be bad news for the bitcoin (BTC) price

info@uweb3.io
-
0
USDT’s dominance rate flashed a golden cross, which may be bad news for the bitcoin (BTC) price

A popular signal that confirms sustained bullish shifts in market momentum just appeared on the dominance chart for Tether’s USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

That may not be good news for bitcoin BTC$63,271.85, the largest cryptocurrency.

USDT’s dominance rate, which measures its share of the total crypto market cap, is sporting a golden crossover, a technical signal that indicates the dollar-pegged token’s allocation may increase in the weeks ahead.

That’s a negative signal for bitcoin because it implies crypto market participants are shifting their funds into a token whose value doesn’t fluctuate against the dollar, rather than piling into riskier investments.

To understand why, it helps first to grasp USDT’s role in crypto markets.

At $186.84 billion, the Tether-issued token trails only bitcoin and ether (ETH) in market cap. It is designed to trade 1:1 against the U.S. dollar and is widely seen as a dollar-equivalent asset, a sort-of tokenized version of the greenback.

Funding currency of choice

It has become the preferred funding currency of choice, investors use it to purchase coins and for DeFi lending and borrowing strategies.

Its dominance rate tends to rise when the price of bitcoin falls, reflecting capital rotation out of more speculative investments into dollar equivalents, a classic risk-off move, much like in traditional finance.

Last week offered a clear glimpse of that dynamic. USDT’s dominance rate surged 13.5% to 9%, the biggest single-day jump since March 2025, as the bitcoin price fell almost 14%, briefly dipping below $60,000.

The golden cross, in which the 50-week moving average overtakes the 200-week average, suggests this rotation may not be over because it’s a sign that momentum in USDT’s share of market cap is becoming more bullish.

In other words, risk aversion across the broader crypto market could deepen, driving continued capital flows into USDT.

It is worth noting that the capital sitting in the stablecoin may not simply be waiting for the right moment to re-enter the market. Investors may convert their holdings to fiat and leave the crypto market altogether.

That appears to be what happened last week. While USDT’s dominance rose sharply, its market cap fell for a third consecutive week. That combination suggests a meaningful portion of the capital did not stay there. More likely, it left the crypto market entirely.

The golden cross arrives alongside bitcoin’s worst weekly performance in months, persistent outflows from spot U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and growing competition from AI stocks for institutional capital.

That confluence of events paints a consistent picture. The appetite for crypto risk is genuinely cooling, not just pausing.

Until USDT’s dominance starts reversing, signaling capital rotating back into risk assets, the path of least resistance for bitcoin and the broader market may remain to the downside.

1...209210211...1,318Page 210 of 1,318