Friday’s U.S. nonfarm payrolls report could inject volatility into the crypto market. Economists expect April job growth to slow sharply, with payrolls forecast to rise by just 62,000 compared with March’s 172,000, while the unemployment rate is seen holding steady around 4.3%, according to Reuters.
At first glance, weaker hiring data appears supportive for bitcoin and other risk assets. A softer labor market could reinforce expectations that the Federal Reserve will keep rates steady this year and potentially delay any tightening cycle beyond that. As of now, markets are pricing in steady rates through this year, followed by a hike next year.
But the picture is more complicated.
Alongside the payrolls release, markets will also be watching wage growth closely. Average hourly earnings are expected to rise 3.8% year-on-year, up from 3.5% previously. Sticky wage pressures, combined with already elevated oil prices, could strengthen inflation concerns globally and complicate the Fed’s path forward.
In other words, the market reaction may hinge less on headline job creation and more on whether wage growth cools. With traders already pricing in the possibility of future rate hikes next year, risk assets may need a softer-than-expected earnings figure to stage a meaningful rally.
For now, analysts remain broadly constructive on bitcoin, with the $75,000 level seen as critical support.
“Bitcoin has returned below $80K, extending its retreat from the 200-day moving average after briefly entering overbought territory near the upper boundary of its uptrend channel. The lower boundary of that channel sits near $77.5K, though a broader trend break would likely require a fall below recent lows around $75K,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro.
Beyond payrolls, traders are also keeping an eye on the upcoming minutes of the Fed’s April meeting, as well as developments in the Strait of Hormuz and global oil markets.
“Prediction markets assign a 97% probability to no Hormuz normalization by May 15. The gap between that pricing and the equity market’s willingness to fade every escalation is the week’s defining contradiction,” Singapore-based QCP Capital said in a market note. “If crude fails to de-escalate before the May 20 FOMC minutes, the stagflation narrative will become much harder to dismiss.”
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
S&P 500 call options volume surges to record $2.6 trillion. Here’s what it means for bitcoin (CoinDesk): Record volumes of bullish S&P 500 call options signal a surge in speculative risk-taking on Wall Street, offering bullish cues to crypto, as the two are positively correlated.
Trump says ceasefire still holds after fighting between the U.S. and Iran flares (Reuters): U.S. and Iran clashed in the Gulf and the UAE came under renewed attack, but Trump said a ceasefire was still holding despite the attacks, which dented hopes for a swift end to the war.
U.S. stocks rise as tech outlook offsets war worries: market wrap. (Bloomberg): A rally in technology stocks is lifting U.S. index futures as investors wait for the monthly jobs report. Oil fluctuated. Benchmarks in Europe and Asia fell. Brent moved to just above $100 a barrel. The dollar headed for a second straight week of losses.
Federal court rules against new global tariffs Trump imposed after loss at the Supreme Court (AP): A federal court ruled against the new global tariffs that Trump imposed after a stinging loss at the Supreme Court. The Court of International Trade in New York ruling found the 10% global tariffs were illegal after small businesses sued.
Today’s signal
Bitcoin’s Coinbase premium. (Coinglass)
The chart by coinglass tracks the Coinbase Bitcoin Premium Index, which measures the price difference between bitcoin traded on Coinbase, a proxy for U.S. institutional and spot demand, and offshore exchanges such as Binance. Green readings indicate BTC is trading at a premium on Coinbase, signaling stronger demand from U.S.-based investors.
The premium has flipped into a discount this week just as bitcoin looked to establish a foothold above $80,000. Interestingly, the rally has stalled.
Historically, bull runs have coincided with persistent positive readings in the index. The next move higher, therefore, warrants a return of the premium.
Stablecoin-based cards could soon account for double-digit percentages of all cards in some Latin American markets, John Timoney, head of strategic partnerships at Rain, a payments infrastructure platform, said.
Retail stablecoin card spend grew about 105% to 106% over the past year, Timoney said during a panel at Consensus Miami 2026. Cards are physical or virtual, allowing users to spend stablecoins such as tether USDT$0.9998 and USD Coin (USDC) directly from a digital wallet for daily purchases.
Rain provides stablecoin infrastructure for card issuers and recently became a Mastercard Principal Member, allowing it to offer credit and prepaid cards on the Mastercard network. Rain and Mastercard are also exploring on-chain settlement for some card program flows using regulated stablecoins.
The company is not trying to replace card networks, Timoney said. It is trying to make stablecoin balances usable through existing networks that already reach merchants globally.
“The card networks over decades have rolled up hundreds of millions of merchants,” Timoney said. “Rain explicitly did not want to reinvent the wheel.”
Spend patterns are also becoming harder to distinguish from ordinary card activity, he said. Stablecoin card users are spending across typical merchant categories, including large global merchants and everyday purchases.
“There’s nothing too remarkable about that,” Timoney said. “And I think that is what is remarkable.”
Despite their growth, stablecoin cards account for less than 1% of global card spend, senior vice president of business development at Consensys Ray Hernandez said during the same panel.
Crypto card adoption
Latin America has become one of the clearest markets for adoption, Timoney added. Stablecoin cards are being used across custodial and non-custodial wallets, crypto exchanges and products that abstract the stablecoin experience from users.
The merchant still receives fiat in many of those transactions. That separates card-based stablecoin spending from direct crypto push payments, where merchants may have to manage crypto settlement, volatility and transaction risk more directly.
The bigger change may be behind the scenes. Rain says stablecoin settlement lets card programs settle on weekends and holidays, reducing trapped capital by more than 40% in some cases.
Traditional card programs often need to pre-fund network obligations or borrow from networks when banking rails are closed. Stablecoins can move outside bank cut-off times.
That can make rewards and card economics more flexible, Timoney said. Capital that would otherwise sit idle can be used elsewhere in the business.
Mastercard has been moving deeper into stablecoin payments. Earlier this year Binance, PayPal and Ripple joined Mastercard’s broader blockchain payments push. That push saw the payments giant agree to buy stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion.
Christian Rau, Mastercard’s senior vice president of digital assets and blockchain, said mainstream adoption will depend on making the technology invisible to consumers.
“Other than the people in this room, nobody says ‘oh, I just did an onchain payment’,” Rau said. “The normal benchmark these days is you have a card sitting on your iPhone or on an Android. You tap it, the money is gone.”
The consumer-facing pitch is not an onchain payment, he added. It is the ability to spend any asset in real time, with the network protections users already expect.
Hernandez said the next stage depends on easier on-ramps, abstracted network fees and more local payment infrastructure. Today’s crypto card users are still mostly crypto-native consumers who already hold assets on-chain.
MetaMask is expanding its card strategy around self-custody, Hernandez said. The MetaMask Card, developed with Mastercard and Baanx, lets users spend from a self-custodial wallet while assets are converted into fiat at the time of purchase.
“If all we’re doing is replicating the Apple Pay experience, I think it’s going to be okay, but I don’t think we’re going to overtake,” Hernandez said.
Paying in crypto
That view drew a challenge from GoMining CEO Mark Zalan, who argued that stablecoins and card infrastructure add unnecessary intermediaries to crypto payments.
Zalan said users want to hold bitcoin in self-custody and spend it without converting into stablecoins or relying on off-ramps. He described conversion layers and payment intermediaries as “little helpers” taking small fees from each transaction.
“Protection is another word for rent-seeking,” Zalan said, referring to the consumer protections embedded in card transactions.
Timoney pushed back, saying payments are not only money movement. Card networks also handle chargebacks, merchant risk and other protections consumers and merchants expect.
Rau made a similar point. Most consumers were “socialized with deposit insurance” and chargeback protection, he said.
“Payment is more than moving money from A to B,” Rau said. “From a consumer perspective, the experience of payment is interoperability, safety and security.”
Former Polkadot insiders report lack of direction and support from leadership, treasury overspending, and even failure to pay contributors for their work.
The exploit of Polkadot’s bridge protocol Hyperbridge last month is a symbol of deeper dysfunction within one of crypto’s most ambitious ecosystems, a former insider says.
Jaskirat Singh, co-founder and former CEO of Polkassembly, which served as the primary governance interface for Polkadot and Kusama for over five years before quietly shutting down last month, told The Defiant the exploit reflects a pattern of costly missteps at Polkadot.
The issues, Singh said, span from lack of direction from ecosystem leadership, to DAO overspending, and even failure to pay ecosystem participants for their contributions, including Polkassembly itself.
A spokesman for Parity, the company behind the development of the Polkadot blockchain, denied those claims.
Bridge Chaos
The Polkadot bridge situation has been expensive and chaotic.
“Hyperbridge, sadly, was the bridge that Polkadot had labeled as the official bridge a while back after having spent millions of dollars on building their own bridge and funding other bridges,” Singh told The Defiant.
A 2024 Polkadot governance vote approved nearly $6 million in combined USDC and DOT for Snowbridge — a Polkadot/Kusama-Ethereum bridge — which launched in 2024 after years of delays, then arrived with what Singh describes as “insane fees.” A subsequent Snowbridge funding request for $3.4 million was rejected by governance last August.
Meanwhile, Polytope Labs, the team behind Hyperbridge, raised $2.5 million in a September 2024 seed round led by Web3 Foundation (W3F), the nonprofit entity behind the Polkadot ecosystem, and VC firm Scytale, which Polkadot founder Gavin Wood advises.
Hyperbridge was elevated to native bridge status a year ago, per a press release from the protocol, with Polkadot governance allocating 795,000 DOT — worth about $3.8 million at the time and just under $1 million today — from the protocol’s treasury for a liquidity campaign.
Stuart Macdonald, chief of staff at Parity, pushed back on Hyperbridge’s and Singh’s framing.
He told The Defiant that Hyperbridge is not in fact Polkadot’s native bridge, and that while it was used for the liquidity campaign, it was “not an ‘official’, Polkadot-endorsed bridge.”
Parity and W3F are now distancing themselves from the protocol entirely.
“Hyperbridge is an independent project deployed as a permissionless parachain in the Polkadot network,” Macdonald told The Defiant.
Who’s Actually Running Polkadot?
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how Polkadot’s institutional structure works.
Polkadot operates with two key entities: Web3 Foundation (W3F), a Swiss non-profit founded by Wood that currently leads advocacy and education with a focus on promoting web3 values; and Parity Technologies, the private company that leads protocol development and engineering.
Wood — who was also one of the co-founders of Ethereum before building Polkadot — currently serves as CEO of Parity, which he also founded, and President of the W3F Council.
This structure is a common one in DeFi, with protocols often opting for a non-profit foundation and a separate Labs company (centralized development company), often also coordinating with a decentralized autonomous organization, aka DAO, which is a community governance body of token holders.
OpenGov – which is Polkadot’s on-chain governance system, where DOT holders vote on decisions, like treasury spending and protocol change – has handled decision-making at Polkadot since 2023.
Polkadot’s origins trace to a 2016 whitepaper, authored by Wood, proposing a “heterogeneous multi-chain framework.” The original framework positions Polkadot explicitly as a Layer 0 chain, the foundational infrastructure on which other chains would run, rather than an application platform in its own right.
It also lays out the architecture and terminology Polkadot would go on to realize in production: a relay chain providing shared security to a network of specialized blockchains called parachains, enabling them to communicate without trusted intermediaries.
W3F raised approximately $145 million in a public ICO in October 2017, followed by multiple private sales in 2019. In Polkadot’s year-end report for that year, Wood said Polkadot conducted a “number of private sales,” selling over 5% of the genesis DOT supply. Wood noted that venture capital firm Placeholder Capital was among the participants, but didn’t reveal much else about the sales.
Finally, a 2020 private sale that raised just under $43 million, also with VC participation, brought total token sale fundraising to an estimated $247.7 million. The mainnet launched in May 2020, with the first parachains going live in late 2021.
W3F Sunsets Initiatives, Including Official Support
While W3F was an active participant in the development of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems since the foundation’s inception, Polkassembly’s co-founder argues that it has largely retreated from that role — a take the foundation itself didn’t deny.
This February, the foundation wound down its official Polkadot Support channels. Earlier, in December, it sunset its general grants program, as well as Decentralized Voices and Decentralized Nodes initiatives.
Leadership instability compounds the picture. Fabian Gompf, appointed W3F CEO in September 2023, stepped down in February 2025 after roughly 16 months. The foundation is now led by managing director Thomas Fecker Boxler, who joined W3F as CFO in March 2023.
Macdonald, who also currently provides official comms for W3F, said the shift was strategic:
“W3F is stepping back from operational roles to concentrate on global advocacy and long-term stewardship. On-chain treasury funding remains fully open and new programmes and initiatives will be rolled out by other entities as needs emerge.”
Indeed, W3F announced in March that it was narrowing its scope toward “championing the long-term vision of Web3 while ensuring that resources entrusted to the Foundation are deployed responsibly.”
Singh was less charitable.
“When the foundation was established, over $200 million went to the foundation — so to four years later come and say like oh now we’re only doing conferences and treasury management…” he said, evidently referring to W3F’s 30% allocation of Polkadot’s initial token supply, which was increased to 1 billion DOT in 2020.
Treasury Payment Issues
Singh told The Defiant that Polkassembly operated for over five years, tracking more than 1,700 Polkadot referenda and serving over 250K participants. He also said that the governance platform kept running for roughly eight months without payment.
After an initial attempt at retroactive compensation was denied, the team submitted a narrower final request for 62,700 USDT this February — $50K of which was to “settle a discounted portion of outstanding contributor compensation for already-delivered OpenGov infrastructure work.” The proposal excluded founder compensation and reflected a “45% reduction following internal discussions.”
It was overwhelmingly rejected, with over 99% of votes against. Anonymous commenters on the proposal said the platform had already “drained” and “milked” millions from the treasury.
While Polkassembly remains referenced and linked on Parity’s official website, as well as the official Polkadot Wiki’s OpenGov guides, such as here and here, Macdonald told The Defiant that Web3 Foundation “has never mandated Polkassembly to perform any work for us,” adding:
“Polkassembly was funded through OpenGov. Their most recent referendum sought retroactive payment for work the community had not approved in advance. The community voted against it decisively, with roughly 0.2% in favour – W3F abstained on that vote.”
Macdonald was also careful to note that W3F votes on decisions alongside other DOT holders and “is an independent entity that is one of many stakeholders in the Polkadot ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, Singh says Polkassembly isn’t alone.
“Everyone has faced the same problem with the foundation not giving any direction for the longest time and then coming in just basically closing all the doors on everyone and not paying them for their work.”
Just last month, a former Parity employee who went on to lead an ambassador program at Polkadot publicly alleged that she had not been paid for agreed-upon work and expenses totaling over $200,000.
Lucy Coulden, who has launched a crowdfunding campaign to cover legal costs, wrote that the uncompensated work for the Polkadot ecosystem spanned eight months and that there was a “clear and reasonable expectation that the work would be supported financially.”
The broader issue, Coulden writes, is that in the case of decentralized ecosystems, accountability can be blurred and individual contributors bear the risk that their work won’t be funded, even retroactively.
“Contributors are encouraged to deliver real work – partnerships, coordination, events and public engagement – often in reliance on governance systems that promise fair funding,” Coulden writes.
Singh said the problem with decentralized entities is that “there’s nobody really driving things. More importantly, there’s no accountability.”
Macdonald tole The Defiant that neither Parity nor W3F owes contractors money.
“To the extent any suggestion is being made that Parity or W3F owes unpaid sums in connection with the matters referenced, we do not accept that any sums are due or that Parity or W3F has any liability in relation to them.”
Referring to Singh’s claims of a broader pattern of not paying ecosystem contributors for their work, Macdonald shifted responsibility to collective DOT token holders, stating, “OpenGov funding decisions rest with DOT holders, and teams whose proposals are not approved are sometimes disappointed,” adding:
“W3F follows rigorous procedures for all its contractual commitments, and we are not aware of any outstanding disputes.”
Treasury Spending
Singh also raised the question of accountability around Polkadot’s treasury spending — including the reported $180K Polkadot spent on private jet branding in May 2024.
Polkadot spent a total of $133 million in 2024 — $48 million on outreach, $32 million on development, $19 million on business development — drawing community criticism, particularly around the $37 million allocated to marketing, advertising, and events in the first half of that year alone.
Spend dropped sharply to $70.6 million for full-year 2025, with Q4 coming in at $7.4 million, the lowest spending quarter since the introduction of OpenGov. But treasury spending for each of the remaining quarters last year was in the double-digit millions of dollars, according to Polkadot’s own reports.
Projects Voting with Their Feet: What Do Parachain Teams Have to Say?
The reported governance dysfunction has a parallel in project departures. Centrifuge, the real-world asset protocol that was among the ecosystem’s flagship parachains, announced last July that it was migrating to Ethereum, citing broader reach and liquidity.
Another project, Manta, announced last January that it was shutting down its Polkadot parachain, Manta Atlantic. Manta had first expanded to Ethereum as an L2 in 2023 and was running the two chains in parallel. In its announcement that it was deprecating its parachain entirely, the team underlined, by way of contrast, the “remarkable growth and adoption” on its L2 versus the parachain.
In November of last year, former parachain Phala, which launched in 2022, officially departed from the ecosystem as well, also migrating to an L2. The project’s DAO had first proposed sunsetting the Phala parachain in September, and later said the move was strategic: “It marks a new era for Phala — a deliberate choice of scalability and future-proofing over legacy infrastructure.”
The original governance proposal to sunset the parachain noted that its so-called slot on the Polkadot relay chain was expiring in November and “[k]eeping it alive would consume significant resources while locking us into an infrastructure with limited scalability.”
In Manta’s case, the official parachain sunsetting announcement was succinct and only indirectly cited lack of adoption in the Polkadot ecosystem as the project’s reason for leaving. But more than six months prior to that official announcement, Manta’s co-founder was explicit about the team’s critiques of the Polkadot ecosystem.
In a July 2, 2024 X post, Victor Ji wrote, “we do not want to engage with the Polkadot ecosystem and team at all.” He continued, echoing similar critiques from Singh:
“It is a highly toxic ecosystem that lacks any real value for web3, and it does not focus on users or adoption at all.”
Notably, Ji’s X post was a response to a post from April of that year criticizing Polkadot treasury spending from none other than the cofounder of Polytope Labs, the firm behind Hyperbridge.
In the scathing X thread, Ji also called the team behind Polkadot “incapable and not truly decentralized,” alleging that Wood and the team, presumably referring to Parity and W3F, had failed to support Polkadot builders.
“[T]he entire Polkadot ecosystem is essentially dead,” Ji wrote.
Commenting on projects leaving the Polkadot ecosystem, Macdonald said, “independent teams make their own strategic decisions.” He also noted that new projects have joined since, and that “using the Polkadot SDK allows for teams to easily join or leave the Polkadot ecosystem.”
In the same X thread, the Manta co-founder also accused the ecosystem and “Polkadot team” of discrimination against Asian founders and developers.
Ecosystem Update: What Do the Numbers Say?
Polkadot parachains collectively hold ~$81 million in DeFi TVL as of May 7, per DefiLlama data — with the bulk, over $75.7 million, sitting on the Hydration protocol.
But in September 2025, Hydration’s TVL reached as high as $376.5 million; it has since fallen more than 80%. For comparison, DeFi TVL on Ethereum currently sits at $48 billion, followed by Solana with $6.8 billion.
Hydration’s parachain, formerly known as HydraX, launched in 2022, but its TVL only began notably growing in 2024, eventually overtaking Moonbeam to become the ecosystem’s dominant DEX and lending protocol by value locked.
Hydration (blue) dominates Polkadot parachains by TVL share. Source: DefiLlama
Other parachains, however, have seen their TVL share shrink, especially over the past year. One of them, Astar Network — which was among the five original parachain slot auction winners in 2021, and secured over 10 million DOT via a crowdloan — represented between 60-70% of total value locked across Polkadot parachains from March-June 2022, per DefiLlama data. That share shrank to ~25% for the next two years and it’s now sitting at just over 2.5% of parachain TVL, as of May 6.
While Astar remains a parachain, the TVL shift reflects the project’s expansion beyond Polkadot to Ethereum and Soneium, Sony’s L2.
Acala, another of the original 2021 parachain cohort, suffered a different fate. Just after its TVL peaked above $110 million in mid-August 2022, a liquidity pool bug caused the erroneous minting over 1.2 billion of the protocol’s native stablecoin, aUSD. As a result, aUSD depegged and Acala’s TVL plummeted to below $50 million in a matter of days. It never recovered and in 2024 began drifting lower, reaching around $122,400 in TVL as of today.
Meanwhile, more broadly, monthly active users across the Polkadot ecosystem currently stands at around 43,000, per data from TokenTerminal, down from ~200,000 in December 2024, and an all-time high of 230,000 in January 2024.
Polkadot’s native token, DOT, is down about 98% from its November 2021 all-time high. Its market cap sits around $2 billion — still a top-50 asset by market cap, but a shadow of its 2021 peak. The native tokens of the original parachain cohort that secured the biggest crowdloans — Astar, Acala, and Moonbeam — are also all down over 98% from their respective highs, which they all reached in January 2022.
DOT all-time price chart. Source: CoinGecko
“The interesting story for me […] was that this model [decentralized governance] has failed broadly and even like Polkadot is kind of done. I mean they haven’t delivered anything for a while. The foundation is also kind of done,” Singh said.
In pushing back against Singh’s claim that Polkadot has slowed down on its technical deliverables recently, Macdonald referred to Polkadot’s Asset Hub migration in November of last year, telling The Defiant: “Polkadot completed what may be the largest ever live-to-live blockchain migration […] Transaction fees dropped 100-fold.”
Indeed, average transaction fees across the ecosystem have dropped from $0.007 the week of Dec. 1, 2025 to $0.00028 this week. But the lower fees haven’t led to increased usage, Token Terminal data shows.
Active users on the monthly and weekly timeframes have mostly trended downward since the start of the year. Since late March, weekly active users have spent three weeks below 10,500 — the lowest weekly levels in the past five years.
Since February, MAU has seen its lowest levels in five years as well, though April saw an uptick to 39,700 from 38,800 active users in March.
Polkadot weekly vs. monthly active users over the past 5 years. Source: Token Terminal
Macdonald said the Polkadot ecosystem’s focus is to continue building.
“We are focused on delivering product-grade infra for a new generation of Web3 applications. In the near term, our goal is to present a set of integrated capabilities that demonstrate what Web3 products can feel like.
The system evolves, our community governs, our engineers deliver. This is a maturing ecosystem,” he told The Defiant.
Indeed, just this week, Polkadot announced a new data storage model for decentralized applications, Bulletin Chain. The model introduces a time limit to improve scalability so that “everyday apps can run on decentralized infrastructure.”
Also this week, DOT staking service Polkadot Cloud announced that the Polkadot ecosystem now lets DApps cover fees for new users, addressing the friction of requiring users to have DOT to pay fees. However, The Defiant was unable to verify the development via Polkadot’s official channels and documentation.
Meanwhile, Polkadot’s DOT is the largest Layer 0 asset by market cap, per CoinGecko data. But the ecosystem’s TVL remains lower than other meta-networks, like Avalanche and Cosmos. The largest Cosmos chain has a TVL of $1.3 billion, while Avalanche’s TVL is over $660 million, compared with Polkadot’s approximately $81 million total, per DefiLlama.
With a recently launched DOT ETF, Polkadot is poised for increased mainstream and institutional attention, and possibly capital. But it remains to be seen where Wood’s “scalable multi-chain” will go from here, and if it can deliver on its ambitious goals — building the infrastructure “for a new generation of Web3” apps.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Bitcoin BTC$79,891.46 tumbled back below $80,000 late Thursday after the U.S. launched fresh airstrikes in Iran, causing brent crude oil to briefly top $100 per barrel before giving back a portion of gains during Asia and European hours.
The crypto market was already slightly jittery after Strategy chairman Michael Saylor said that the company would consider selling bitcoin to cover dividend payments from its STRC, a u-turn from its previous “never sell” strategy.
Ether (ETH) is trading at $2,280 having lost 0.2% since midnight UTC and around 2% over the past 24 hours, with other altcoins like monero (XMR) and dash (DASH) losing between 4% and 5%.
The broader crypto recovery remains intact with bitcoin having rallied from $65,000 in late March, although it’s worth noting that a drop below $75,000 would negate the recent string of higher lows and would signal a reversion to the pervious trading range.
Derivatives positioning
The crypto futures market has cooled for the second-straight day, with cumulative industry notional open interest down over 1.5% at $131.5 billion and trading volume down over 12% at $191 billion. Investors are clearly deleveraging in the wake of bitcoin’s overnight drop below $80,000.
Exchanges have liquidated nearly $300 million in bets in 24 hours, with longs accounting for most of the tally. It shows that traders were positioned for continued price rises into the weekend, only to take the brunt of the unexpected market weakness.
Open interest (OI) has declined in most major tokens, including bitcoin and ether. Meme token DOGE’s OI has dropped by over 4%, the most among top 10 coins. TON is the standout, with OI rising by 6%.
For the second straight day, OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta for most majors remains negative, a sign of traders aggressively shorting using market orders rather than passive limit orders.
On Deribit, the most actively traded contract over the past 24 hours was a BTC $105,000 call option expiring June 26. Market positioning has also shifted, with the top five most traded contracts now including put options at $80,000, $75,000, and $60,000 strikes. This marks a clear change from the previous three sessions, when calls dominated trading activity.
Bitcoin’s annualized 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, remains near 40%, the lowest since late January, a sign of market calm ahead of the pivotal U.S. nonfarm payrolls report.
Token talk
Despite relative weakness across crypto majors and privacy coins, CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) surged by more than 3% since midnight UTC, buoyed by an 8.2% gain in the price of ONDO.
Ondo Finance is a real-world asset (RWA) project that on Thursday completed its first cross-border cross-bank redemption of U.S. treasuries having worked with JP Morgan, Mastercard and Ripple, driving price appreciation over the past 24 hours into Friday.
The CoinDesk Memecoin Select Index (CDMEME) lost ground on Friday, posting a 0.1% swing to the downside to make it the only CoinDesk benchmark in the red.
CoinMarketCap’s “altcoin season” indicator is at 42/100, significantly higher than in April when it was as low as 31/100. The total market cap of altcoins during that period has risen from below $1 trillion to $1.05 trillion.
The programme – already live in a host of markets – is designed to help the Canadian payments ecosystem prepare for a world where AI agents may act on behalf of consumers to initiate and complete transactions.
Participants can test agent-initiated payments in controlled, real-world environments using live cards and real merchants; validate core payment flows; and assess trust and security mechanisms.
Canada’s Big 5 – BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank, and TD – are all signed up as issuing partners, with additional firms expected to follow.
“Visa Agentic Ready gives Canadian issuers a meaningful head start in preparing for agent-initiated commerce,” says Michiel Wielhouwer, president and country manager, Visa Canada.
Separately, the Agentic Ready programme is also live in Malaysia, with Alliance Bank, CIMB and Maybank onboard.
Previn Pillay, country manager, Visa Malaysia, says: “Visa Agentic Ready gives Malaysian issuers a practical and structured way to better understand how agent-initiated payments could work on the Visa network — before these experiences scale.”
Nearly half of US voters are willing to cross party lines to get clear crypto regulation off the ground, while public support for the CLARITY Act could bring an electoral benefit for politicians, according to a new survey from HarrisX.
The poll included responses from 2,008 registered voters from May 1-4. It found that 52% of respondents support the CLARITY Act, with just 11% opposed.
About half, or 47%, said they would consider voting for a candidate outside their preferred party if that candidate backed the bill and their own party did not. Among crypto users, that number jumped to 72%.
“Passing the CLARITY Act is a bipartisan, winning issue,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on X on Thursday. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev added: “There’s real momentum now to finally get CLARITY across the finish line. One more small push and we establish the legislative foundation to ensure American dominance in digital finance.”
Source: HarrisX
The crypto industry has been waiting for the CLARITY Act to move through the US legislative process. It is expected to provide long-awaited regulatory clarity for crypto and could help the country become a major hub for crypto and digital finance.
The HarrisX poll also highlighted strong bipartisan support for the bill, with 55% of Democrats, 58% of Republicans and 42% of independents supporting it. Public support for the bill could also give senators a 20-point electoral advantage, it said
Related: Bitmine’s Tom Lee says ‘crypto spring’ has already begun
Some predict the CLARITY Act will receive additional markups as soon as next week.
Speaking at the Consensus 2026 crypto industry conference in Miami on Wednesday, Coinbase’s vice president of US policy, Kara Calvert, said her “prediction is that we have a markup next week” from the Senate Banking Committee.
Calvert stressed that bipartisan support will get the bill across the line, saying it needs at least 60 votes to pass the Senate, but she is unsure how things will unfold in the coming days.
“That means you need Democrats. You need a bipartisan bill, and we have all been working really hard to make sure that bipartisanship holds. I think the big question is, how do these votes shape up over the next few days?”
The timeline for a vote may still be months away, however. US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently suggested additional markups are required before the bill can progress, predicting a Senate vote in August.
Magazine:Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs — Mid-2026
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The U.S. stock market is heating up in a way that suggests speculative mania. It matters to bitcoin as analysts have linked the cryptocurrency’s recent rally to increased risk-taking on Wall Street.
The overheating signals come from options tied to the S&P 500. These are derivative contracts that let traders bet on or hedge against moves in the index. A call option is a bet that the index will rise above a certain price within a set time. A put option does the opposite, offering protection from declines in the index.
On Wednesday, U.S. equity derivative exchanges registered a notional volume of $2.6 trillion in S&P 500 call options, according to data tracked by Zero Hedge. That amounted to 60% of total S&P 500 options activity. To put it into context, the notional amount nearly matched the total crypto market valuation of $2.73 trillion, which represents the combined capitalization of thousands of cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin leading the way.
In essence, the majority of market participants were positioned for upside through calls or bullish exposure.
On the surface, the implication for bitcoin is straightforward: it is bullish. A speculative surge in the S&P 500 could spill over into crypto, driving valuations higher. After all, double-digit gains in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq since early April played a big role in lifting bitcoin to $80,000 from under $70,000 a few weeks ago.
QCP Capital put it best early this week when BTC broke above $80,000: “After a solid April, BTC has begun May on firm footing, breaking above $80k for the first time since January 31. The move appears aligned with equities, reinforcing a broader trend as BTC’s correlation with U.S. stocks climbing back toward 2023 levels, signaling a renewed linkage with risk assets broadly.”
Call options volume in the S&P 500. (ZeroHedge)
That said, the outsized investor bias for bullish exposure in the S&P 500 has raised alarm on social media, with several handles calling it a sign of an overcrowded trade. When too many investors lean in the same direction, in this case, heavily bullish, it leaves the market more vulnerable to sharp reversals in sentiment and positioning if price momentum stalls.
It’s not just social chatter either. Media reports have also cited Goldman Sachs analysts describing the market as being in a “semi-irrational chasing mode,” a phrase widely read as a play on the semiconductor-driven surge in equities.
If that’s not enough, the bullish momentum in the Nasdaq-listed PHLX Semiconductor Sector index (SOX), as measured by the 14-week relative strength index, is strongest since 1999, according to data source TradingView.
All of that is hinting at speculative frenzy. If it unwinds just as quickly, downside volatility could spill over into bitcoin and the broader crypto market, given their positive correlation. Let’s see how things unfold…
Some Revolut users saw bitcoin briefly display far below market prices on Friday, with app charts showing a sudden plunge before snapping back near prevailing levels, in what appeared to be either a pricing display issue or a liquidity-related dislocation.
Revolut’s official bitcoin page shows BTC briefly marked around £29,414 on Revolut’s one-day chart before returning near £58,600. Other social media posts claimed the app showed even lower prints, including near-zero prices as low as 2-cents, though CoinDesk could not independently verify those levels or confirm whether any trades were actually executed there.
The issue seemed isolated as no exchange on lists tracked by CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap showed any bitcoin price anomaly. It trades just over $79,000 as of Asian afternoon hours Friday.
Revolut had not responded to a CoinDesk request for comment by publication time.
Some users on X claimed buy orders executed during the disruption, but those reports remain unconfirmed. If trades were filled, Revolut would likely have to determine whether the prints reflected legitimate liquidity, stale quotes, a routing issue or a platform-side pricing error.
Flash moves in crypto apps can happen for several reasons. A display glitch can show an incorrect price without actual market execution. Thin liquidity on a specific venue or internal pricing rail can also produce sharp wicks if an order sweeps through a shallow book.
In other cases, market makers briefly pull quotes, spreads widen, and apps relying on aggregated feeds may display prices that do not match deeper global markets.
Crypto has seen similar isolated dislocations before. Bitcoin briefly printed far below market on Binance’s USD1 pair in December in a move tied to a thinly traded pair rather than broader selling. South Korean exchanges also saw sharp local wicks during the country’s martial-law shock in 2024 as activity surged and local order books briefly broke from global prices.
Nvidia is allying with glassmaker Corning to construct three new optical fiber production plants.
The companies are positioning the factories — to be built in North Carolina and Texas — as advancing U.S. AI supply chains. Under the agreement, Corning will increase its U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity tenfold and expand its U.S. fiber production capacity by more than 50%.
Financial terms of the deal, which gives Nvidia the option to invest up to $2.7 billion in Corning, were not disclosed.
“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time — and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a release. “We are … building the foundation for AI infrastructure where intelligence moves at the speed of light while advancing the proud tradition of Made in America.”
Related:Anthropic and SpaceX Agree to Major Compute Capacity Deal
Optical connectivity is a central component of AI infrastructure, used to move data at ever-expanding speed and scale as companies ramp up deployment of the technology.
Within this, fiber-optic cables (thin, flexible strands of glass) transmit data as photons, offering faster speeds and lower energy consumption than traditional copper wires. They also reduce signal loss, improving reliability and enabling tighter clustering of the hundreds of thousands of GPUs inside modern data centers.
“This partnership is proof that AI is not just a technology story. It is a manufacturing story, and it is happening here in the United States,” Wendell P. Weeks, CEO and president of New York state-based Corning, said in the release. “We are ensuring the critical technologies powering AI are invented, engineered and built in America.”
The development is the latest in a spate of deals from Nvidia, with the AI chip giant striking billions of dollars’ worth of deals across the AI industry as it pushes market expansion.
On Wednesday, Nvidia bought $500 million in rights to Corning shares, Bloomberg reported, and Corning shares rose sharply. Earlier this year, Nvidia agreed to $4 billion in deals with optical technology companies Lumentum and Coherent, which manufacture components that convert data between light and electrical signals.
Zcash will roll out quantum-recoverable wallets within a month and reach full post-quantum status within 12 to 18 months, Zcash Open Development Lab founder and CEO Josh Swihart told a Consensus Miami audience on Thursday in a session moderated by Solana infra firm Helius’s founder Mert Mumtaz.
A separate scaling track is targeting MasterCard- and Visa-scale throughput on a similar horizon.
The roadmap arrived during a ZEC rally that has lifted the token more than 110% over the past 30 days as prominent crypto fund Multicoin Capital disclosed a sizable ZEC investment and the privacy narrative caught on among investors, sentiment daata shows.
Swihart’s pitch was that Bitcoin no longer holds up as the cypherpunk-grade money it was meant to be. The asset works as an ETF wrapper and a store of value, he said, but as a peer-to-peer private payment system “it’s just fundamentally broken.”
Visible balances on a transparent ledger let governments seize what they can see, he argued, the same wealth-visibility critique Multicoin’s Tushar Jain leaned on this week when disclosing the fund’s purchases.
The user-side traction is running through the Electric Coin Company’s mobile wallet after an October integration with Near Intents opened cross-chain swaps from assets like BTC, SOL and USDC directly into shielded ZEC.
Near Intents lets a user state what they want, like turning USDC into ZEC, while specialized routers handle the multi-step trade across different blockchains in the background.
Roughly $600 million to $700 million has flowed through that route since launch, mostly to and from USD and USDC, Swihart said. Near’s broader intent-based system has processed close to $800 million in volume over the past 30 days alone, per Near Protocol data, with Ethereum, Solana and Zcash dominating the chain side.
A separate proposal to cut Zcash’s target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds is in active discussion on the project’s community forum, with bridges to Solana and Hyperliquid already live, Mumtaz noted.
Token-holder voting through Zashi is also slated, Swihart said, less as formal governance and more as an opinion layer feeding the project’s existing rough-consensus model.
For traders, the cleanest near-term test is whether quantum recoverability actually ships within Swihart’s stated month. The fail-safe is the shielded pool, which now sits at roughly 30% of circulating ZEC, an all-time high. If it keeps growing alongside price, the rally is being underwritten by adoption rather than speculation
