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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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
Paxos Securities Settlement Company, LLC (PSSC) has received full registration to provide clearing and settlement services by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Stablecoin issuer Paxos said the regulatory milestone makes its subsidiary the first blockchain firm authorized to operate as a central securities depository (CSD) for traditional equities in the U.S., positioning it alongside legacy post-trade frameworks like the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
The approval clears a bottleneck for Paxos’ goals for institutional tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), providing market participants with a pipeline to clear and settle digital asset trades involving traditional equities, per SEC’s response to Paxos on March 11.
Paxos, which already holds licenses from the OCC in the U.S., Singapore’s MAS, and Europe’s FIN-FSA. said the central clearinghouse designation also allows it to bundle regulated stock clearing with its existing white-label infrastructure tools used by PayPal and Mastercard.
The SEC first granted Paxos no-action relief in 2019, allowing the firm to develop a live settlement pilot in February 2020, which allowed it to integrate traditional finance (TradFi) giants such Bank of America, Credit Suisse and Societe Generale to clear daily U.S. equities transitions.
Paxo’s newly registered status enables it to bypass legacy settlement infrastructure entirely. With blockchain as the clearing rail, PSSC can settle eligible securities on a same-day or nearly instantly, eliminating the traditional settlement window and freeing up locked capital for institutional participants.
In traditional capital markets, stock trades execute in milliseconds, but final settlement, the actual exchange of cash for legal asset ownership, is processed through a centralized clearing house, typically, the DTCC.
While the U.S. equity markets transitioned to a T+1 (one business day) standard settlement cycle in 2024, legacy financial plumbing continues to be restrained to structural delays, trapped collateral and counterparty risks.
Solana (SOL) futures dropped sharply in May as traders reduced leveraged exposure across all exchanges. SOL open interest (OI) dropped to $1.90 billion on Thursday from $2.75 billion on May 11, a 30% decline, while funding rates remained close to neutral. The combination points to weakening investor sentiment as SOL eyes a retest of its yearly low at $68.
SOL spot demand offsets futures market weakness
The aggregated funding rate for Solana futures held near -0.005, showing balanced positioning between longs and shorts. SOL traders have not built aggressive directional bets despite the recent price slide to $80.
SOL price, aggregated open interest, and funding rate. Source: velo chart
At the same time, the aggregated futures volume cumulative volume delta (CVD) for stablecoin-margined orders fell to a yearly low of -$13 billion. The CVD tracks whether buyers or sellers are more active over time. The decline signals stronger sell-side pressure in futures markets through May.
BTC price, aggregated spot and futures CVD. Source: Coinalyze
However, spot activity paints a steadier picture. Spot CVD has improved to $350 million since March, showing that buyers have continued to absorb supply on spot exchanges even as derivatives positioning has weakened.
The positive flows into spot SOL exchange-traded funds (ETFs) added to that trend. The monthly net inflows reached $113 million in May, marking the strongest monthly total for SOL ETFs in 2026.
The split between futures selling and steady spot accumulation often points to a lower level of speculative appetite rather than panic selling. This indicates that leveraged traders reduced risk exposure, while spot buyers continued to add positions gradually.
Spot SOL ETF netflows. Source: SoSoValue
Related: Three key XRP metrics suggest ‘explosive price expansion’ is next
SOL retests the $80 price floor of a three-month range
From a technical standpoint, SOL continues to trade inside a broad range between $80 and $95. The range formed after Solana fell 42% during Q1. The price returned to the lower boundary on Wednesday after another rejection near the resistance level.
A move below $80 places focus on the yearly low near $68. The liquidation heat maps show more than $800 million in cumulative long leverage sitting near that zone, making it an important liquidity pocket if downside pressure increases.
Crypto trader Cold Blooded Shiller described SOL as one of the weaker large-cap charts in the market. In a post on X, the trader said SOL has been in a downtrend since October and lacks strong support below the current price level of $80.
Crypto commentator Zoe also placed bids near $67, closely aligning with the yearly low and the largest cluster of leveraged liquidations identified on the open leveraged positions heatmap.
SOL liquidation map. Source: CoinGlass
Related: HYPE chases new highs as ETF inflows, institutional adoption accelerate
