Exodus launches Exodus Pay, a feature that lets users spend crypto directly from its wallet app.
The rollout is limited to five U.S. states, including New York and California.
The company says the feature aims to reduce reliance on third-party payment platforms.
Exodus, the publicly traded crypto wallet provider, began rolling out a new “Exodus Pay” feature on Wednesday, aiming to turn its self-custodial storage app into a tool for everyday payments. The launch is currently limited to users in five states, including New York and California.
The Omaha-based firm listed its stock on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 and says the new feature expands the role of its wallet beyond storage into payments. The company positions the service as an alternative to centralized payment apps.
“Most payment apps are third parties that hold your funds for you,” Exodus co-founder and CEO JP Richardson told Decrypt. “That means they can freeze your account, reverse transactions, and decide what you’re allowed to buy.” Exodus, by contrast, can’t do that, because users remain in control of their funds at all times.
The company says Exodus Pay works within the existing wallet app and allows users to spend USD-backed stablecoins, such as USDC, or Bitcoin at merchants that accept Visa or Apple Pay.
“The problem with self-custody until now has been the friction. Seed phrases, complicated networks—most self-custody consumer experiences aren’t built for someone who just wants to pay for groceries or send friends money,” Richardson said.
To encourage adoption, Exodus says it will subsidize network fees and allow transfers using phone numbers. The service remains geographically limited due to regulatory requirements. It is currently available only in Nebraska, Texas, Florida, New York, and California.
Richardson said the company has focused on simplifying the user experience, claiming that “someone with zero crypto experience should be able to use an app intuitively.”
Exodus joins a growing list of crypto wallet developers that let customers pay for purchases using crypto or stablecoins, including Coinbase, BitPay, and PayPal.
After the initial launch, Richardson said the company plans to expand the service nationwide over the next several weeks.
“By mid-April, everyone in America will have Exodus Pay in their app,” Richardson said. For existing users, the feature will appear as an automatic update rather than a new download. “If you already have Exodus, you’ll have Exodus Pay,” he added.
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Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron layer-1 blockchain network, criticized World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance platform co-founded by US President Donald Trump’s sons, over lengthy lock-up periods for the platform’s governance token.
Sun said that he invested “significant capital” in WLFI as an early investor and also said that a March WLFI governance proposal to determine token lock-up periods, in which more than 76% of the voting tokens came from 10 wallets, lacked transparency. In a Sunday post on X, Sun wrote (in translation):
“The governance votes cited to justify the above actions were not conducted through fair or transparent procedures. Key information was withheld from voters, meaningful participation was restricted, and outcomes were predetermined.”
“Justin’s favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct,” World Liberty Financial said in response, threatening legal action against Sun over his claims.
Source: World Liberty Financial
The incident came amid community pushback against WLFI and confirmation that the platform was using its own governance tokens as loan collateral, causing the price of WLFI to sink to an all-time low and renewed backlash against Trump for his crypto activities.
Cointelegraph reached out to World Liberty Financial but did not obtain a response by the time of publication.
Related: World Liberty signals phased WLFI unlock vote after early holder backlash
WLFI token sinks to all-time low as community backlash mounts
The WLFI token hit a new all-time low on Saturday, falling to just $0.07 following news of the platform using WLFI tokens as collateral to borrow stablecoins.
Wallets linked to World Liberty Financial used WLFI tokens as collateral on Dolomite, a DeFi platform co-founded by the project’s chief technology officer, Corey Caplan, to take out the stablecoin loan.
Source: World Liberty Financial
WLFI confirmed that it acts as an “anchor” borrower, which generates yield for the platform and value for token holders, adding that it is “one of the largest suppliers and borrowers” in the WLFI ecosystem.
“Treating the crypto community as a personal ATM is unjust and has never been authorized through any fair, transparent, good-faith community governance process,” Sun said.
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Dogecoin’s 2021 run is the benchmark every meme coin gets measured against. What most people forget is the speed. DOGE entered January 2021 near $0.004. It peaked at $0.74 on May 8. That is approximately 18,500% in four months. January alone posted a 711% monthly gain. The rally that made thousands of early buyers wealthy did not take years. It took one season.
The reason insiders predict faster is simple. DOGE needed a discovery event to create the price. AlphaPepe already has the product confirmed. The discovery event is Q2. The difference between building toward product and already having it running is the difference between months of community speculation and weeks of confirmed infrastructure.
Why Dogecoin’s 2021 Speed Is the Benchmark and Why AlphaPepe Can Match It
DOGE’s January 2021 gain of 711% happened before most retail buyers knew what Dogecoin was. The early buyers who held from $0.004 through the retail discovery wave did not need the price to move to know the token was undervalued. They needed the market to find what they had already found. The Robinhood listing, the Elon Musk tweets, the Reddit community momentum all compressed into weeks of price discovery that took DOGE from fractions of a cent to $0.74.
The specific condition that enabled that speed was the pre-discovery entry. The price had never been assigned by a major exchange. The retail wave that created the 18,500% gain was the market assigning the first price at scale. Once assigned, the multiplication was permanent for the buyers who held through it.
AlphaPepe’s Q2 DEX launch is the equivalent discovery event. Not a tweet. Not a Reddit thread. A live AI-powered DEX with a public demo generating confirmed trading fee revenue as the first institutional signal that this is real infrastructure rather than a meme with a mascot.
AI DEX Confirmed Live. Stage 12 Nears Sell Out. Q2 Is the Discovery Event.
Not Launched on DEX Yet. Stage 11 Sold Out. Over $820,000 Raised. Stage 12 at $0.01422.
AlphaPepe is at $0.01422 in Stage 12 with over $820,000 raised from 7,600+ holders and 100 new wallets entering daily. AlphaSwap is live with the public demo confirmed, a cross-chain AI-powered DEX with contract screening, whale tracking, and trend detection generating real trading fee revenue before any exchange has listed the token. The developer who built it was a member of the Shibarium team at Shiba Inu, an infrastructure project that ran through over 500 million mainnet transactions, before redirecting to build this. A 10/10 BlockSAFU audit was completed before the presale opened. Tokens arrive instantly at purchase. No vesting. Staking at 85% APR from day one. Buyers entering $2,000 or more can use code ALPHA50 for a 50% bonus on their token count.
At $0.01422 a $2,000 entry produces 140,646 tokens. With ALPHA50 that becomes 210,969 tokens. Analysts targeting $1.50 at Q2 DEX launch put that at around $316,454. At $3.50 ahead of the Tier 1 CEX debut those tokens approach $738,392. DOGE’s early buyers needed four months for the discovery event to arrive. AlphaPepe’s discovery event is Q2. The AI DEX is confirmed live. Stage 12 is nearing sell out. The buyers who move before the discovery event are the ones the next generation of insiders will reference the way we reference DOGE’s $0.004 buyers today.
Join the AlphaPepe presale before Stage 12 sells out.
FAQs
Why do insiders predict AlphaPepe’s rally could be faster than Dogecoin’s 2021 peak? DOGE’s 18,500% run from $0.004 to $0.74 in four months was driven by community enthusiasm and a tweet-triggered retail wave assigning the first price at scale. AlphaPepe’s Q2 discovery event is backed by a confirmed live AI DEX with a public demo generating real fee revenue, a 10/10 audit, and $820,000 in presale capital, giving the launch a product foundation that DOGE never had behind its equivalent pre-listing moment.
What could a $2,000 Stage 12 entry with ALPHA50 be worth at Q2 launch? At $0.01422 with ALPHA50 a $2,000 entry produces 210,969 tokens worth around $316,454 at $1.50 and $738,392 at the $3.50 Tier 1 projection.
Why is AlphaPepe the next crypto to explode as the AI DEX launch is confirmed? The AI DEX demo going live publicly confirms the infrastructure that 7,600 holders have been accumulating around is real and operational before listing. The Q2 first pricing event is the discovery moment that assigns the market’s first value to a token at $0.01422 before any exchange has participated, the same structural position that made Dogecoin’s January 2021 buyers wealthy before the market found the token.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry risk, including total loss of capital.
All market analysis and token data are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial advice. Readers should conduct independent research and consult licensed advisors before investing.
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Zcash (ZEC) is up more than 62% this week, recently trading around $380.
Predictors on Myriad now favor the privacy token to move to $420 during the month, another 10% move higher.
Optimism has swelled in the last 24 hours, representing a 40% odds shift on Myriad’s prediction market.
Traders have flipped optimistic on an even bigger near-term surge for privacy-focused token Zcash (ZEC) after a nearly 62% boost in the last week of trading.
ZEC is changing hands around $379.89 on Friday, up 15% in the last 24 hours, 62% in the last week, and now more than 77% in the last month.
That move has shifted odds of the token jumping to $420 in April—a further 10% move up—to 60% on Myriad, a prediction market operated by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan.
The odds shift represents a significant boost in optimism among predictors, who overwhelmingly sided against the token’s jump to $420 as recent as Thursday. At the time, odds stood around 80% against an April move to $420.
A specific catalyst for the token’s move is difficult to pinpoint, though crypto’s top assets are all moving up strongly following the conditional ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran.
It has not been a privacy-specific move either. While the category has risen 21% on the week, according to data from CoinGecko, its performance is largely buoyed by ZEC and DASH—the latter of which has jumped around 48% in the last week of trading. Other popular crypto tokens with a connection to privacy, like Monero (XMR) and ZKsync (ZK) have jumped 6.1% and fallen 4.4% during that time, respectively.
Zcash has strongly outperformed crypto majors of late, with Bitcoin trading around $72,531 on Friday, a 9% move higher in the last week of trading. Meanwhile, Ethereum has jumped similarly, boosting 8.5% in the last seven days to trade around $2,226.
Despite the token’s weekly gain, it still sits nearly 46% off its November high of $698, and even further from its all-time high of $3,191 set in October 2016.
At the end of March, a critical vulnerability in the Zcash node software was patched, derisking millions of dollars’ worth of tokens in the process.
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The push to pass crypto legislation in the United States has picked up pace again, this time with rare alignment between policymakers and one of the crypto industry’s most influential voices.
A new statement from Brian Armstrong has added new weight to calls for Congress to move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, just as pressure is coming from Washington to bring the bill back into focus.
Treasury Steps In As Urgency Builds In Washington
One of the most consequential voices in American crypto just changed sides. Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, declared on social media that it is time to pass the Clarity Act, publicly endorsing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 in a post on X, the same legislation he had twice rejected previously.
The comment by Armstrong is in response to a forceful Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and is one of the first few signs that the legislative standoff over US crypto market structure may finally be reaching its end.
Discussions around the CLARITY Act increased after Scott Bessent publicly called on lawmakers to act, noting that the United States risks falling behind in shaping the future of digital finance without clear regulations. In the opinion piece, Bessent mentioned how Congress has already spent years attempting to define how digital assets should be treated and that the time for debate is running out.
Bitcoin is now trading at $71,500. Chart: TradingView
The Treasury Secretary also noted the difference in other jurisdictions with clearer regulatory rules, such as Abu Dhabi and Singapore. Therefore, passing the CLARITY Act is important to bringing back blockchain developers and crypto entrepreneurs to the United States after much of the industry relocated to these countries.
“There is one way to give developers and entrepreneurs the comfort to reshore: durable law,” he said.
The piece also connected the CLARITY Act to its predecessor, the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin framework that President Trump signed into law in July 2025. The Genius Act proved that progress is possible, but the progress cannot be fully realized without support from the CLARITY Act.
Armstrong Expresses Support
Armstrong responded to Bessent opinion, noting how it is time to pass the Clarity Act.
“Grateful for all the bipartisan work among Senators and staff over the past several months to make this a strong bill,” the Coinbase CEO said.
Armstrong’s response to Bessent’s remarks is a notable turn for Coinbase, which has played a complicated role in the bill’s journey to being passed. In January 2026, he publicly withdrew Coinbase’s support for the Senate Banking Committee’s draft, stating that the version was materially worse than the current regulatory status quo and that Coinbase would rather have no bill than a bad one.
SEC Chair Paul Atkins also backed the Treasury Secretary’s comments, stating in a post on X how it’s high time for Congress to future-proof against rogue regulators and advance comprehensive market structure legislation to US President Donald Trump’s desk.
Featured image from Pexels, chart from TradingView
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Fellowship PAC filed its first FEC expenditure on April 8, 2026, directing $300,000 to Nxum Group LLC for advertising.
The ad buy backed Clay Fuller in GA-14, but the PAC’s pledged $100M has not appeared in any FEC contribution filings.
Jesse Spiro became Fellowship PAC chairman on April 1, 2026, deepening Tether U.S. ties ahead of the November midterms.
Tether-Connected PAC Backs Clay Fuller in GA-14 With $300K Ad Spend
Fellowship PAC filed a 24/48 Hour Report of Independent Expenditures with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on April 8, 2026, marking its first disclosed spending since forming in 2025. The latest expenditure news was first reported on by Coindesk author Jesse Hamilton on Sunday.
The $300,000 payment went to Nxum Group LLC, based in Dover, Del., for advertising purposes. The disbursement was made on April 6, and the ad reportedly ran publicly on April 7. The filing was signed by PAC treasurer Mitchell Nobel.
The ad supported Clay Fuller, a Republican running for U.S. House in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Fuller is a Trump-backed candidate who recently won a special election to succeed former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Fellowship PAC had not publicly announced the buy or added Fuller to its endorsement list at the time of filing.
The vendor at the center of the disclosure carries its own set of ties. Nxum Group LLC was co-founded by Bo Hines, who serves as CEO of Tether U.S. and previously advised the Trump administration on crypto policy, along with his father, Todd Hines, and a third partner.
Crypto America journalist Eleanor Terrett reported on Spiro being named on April 1, 2026.
Fellowship PAC’s own leadership structure runs through Tether’s U.S. operations. On April 1, 2026, Jesse Spiro, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Head of Government Affairs at Tether U.S., was named chairman of the PAC. Nobel, the treasurer, is an executive at Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that custodies Tether’s dollar reserves.
Hamilton’s report notes that Tether International has stated it has no affiliation with Fellowship PAC. The PAC launched publicly Sept. 15, 2025, announcing more than $100 million in committed funds from undisclosed backers. Despite that pledge, FEC summary data covering Aug. 7 through Dec. 31, 2025, showed zero contributions, zero receipts, and zero cash on hand.
Super PACs are required to disclose contributions over $200. No major donors have appeared in filings to date. The $300,000 outlay is modest relative to what larger crypto PACs have spent in recent election cycles. Fairshake, the industry’s best-funded political operation, spent over $130 million in the 2024 cycle. Fellowship PAC has positioned itself as a distinct effort focused on regulatory clarity and U.S. leadership in digital assets.
Since the April 1 leadership change, the PAC’s X account and website have grown more active. Endorsements include Blake Miguez, Nate Morris, Pete Ricketts, Julia Letlow, and Mike Collins. Besides an endorsement for Alan Wilson for Governor of South Carolina, and the others, the PAC’s social media account showcases its launch announcement in its first post.
Fellowship PAC also endorses the CLARITY Act. “The CLARITY Act brings clear rules, consumer protections, and U.S. leadership in digital assets. Innovation doesn’t wait- Congress shouldn’t either. Pass CLARITY now,” the PAC wrote on Jan. 23, 2026.
Whether the PAC’s reported war chest eventually surfaces in FEC filings will become clearer when the next quarterly report is due around mid-April or in July 2026. Fellowship PAC’s full donor list and total fundraising remain undisclosed pending further filings.
Now almost a week old, the Bitcoin (BTC) recovery is “fragile” as the crypto market faces geopolitical and macroeconomic headwinds from the ongoing war in the Middle East, according to Nic Puckrin, a crypto market analyst and founder of the Coin Bureau media outlet.
“Even if the war ends now, its repercussions will likely be the story of 2026, and certainly the dominant narrative for Q2. I don’t expect to see a rate cut until late Q3 or Q4, if at all,” Puckrin told Cointelegraph. He said that he sees:
“For a push toward $90,000, we would need to see a combination of factors: a ceasefire that results in the end of geopolitical tensions, a sustained drop in oil prices toward $80, and ideally also softer-than-expected economic data that calms stagflation fears.”
If Bitcoin closes the week above $71,000, it could signal continued upside for BTC, with resistance forming around the $74,000 level, he said. At last look, it was trading at about $71,276, according to TradingView data.
BTC faces resistance at the $74,000 level and continues to trade below its 200-day exponential moving average. Source: TradingView
The ongoing conflict has caused an inflationary spike, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index report, published on Friday, chilling hopes of further interest rate cuts in 2026. Rate cuts or credit easing tend to stimulate asset prices.
Related: Bitcoin, Ether near levels that could signal trend reversal: Analyst
Bitcoin stumbles as Iran negotiations fail and US President threatens major escalation
Bitcoin surged by about 5.8% beginning on April 6, reaching above $73,000, before retracing to about $71,000 on April 11, following news of failed negotiations between the US and Iran, according to the Kobeissi Letter.
“Peace talks appear to have come to a screeching halt,” Kobeissi Letter said, adding, “the outcome of talks was arguably the worst-case scenario.”
Following the failed peace talks, US President Donald Trump said he directed the US military to form a naval blockade around the Strait of Hormuz.
“I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in international waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” Trump said on Saturday.
Source: Donald Trump
Members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which decides interest rate policy in the US, remain divided on further interest rate cuts in 2026, citing inflation concerns from the war.
The FOMC did not rule out an interest rate hike in 2026 if inflation remains elevated above its 2% target, according to the meeting minutes from the March FOMC meeting.
According to the CME Fedwatch tool, there is more than a 98% probability of the FOMC maintaining the current target rate range of 350-375 basis points at the next two meetings, on April 29 and June 17. Chances drop to about 65% for the July 29 meeting, with a 33.6% probability of a 25-bps cut.
Magazine: Big Questions: Can Bitcoin save you from the dreaded Cantillon Effect?
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A developer recreated Claude Opus-style reasoning in a local open-source model.
The resulting “Qwopus” model runs on consumer hardware and rivals much larger systems.
It shows how distillation can bring frontier AI capabilities offline and into developers’ hands.
Claude Opus 4.6 is the kind of AI that makes you feel like you’re talking to someone who actually read the entire internet, twice, and then went to law school. It plans, it reasons, and it writes code that actually runs.
It is also completely inaccessible if you want to run it locally on your own hardware, because it lives behind Anthropic’s API and costs money per token. A developer named Jackrong decided that wasn’t good enough, and took matters into his own hands.
The result is a pair of models—Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled and its evolved successor Qwopus3.5-27B-v3—that run on a single consumer GPU and try to reproduce how Opus thinks, not just what it says.
The trick is called distillation. Think of it like this: A master chef writes down every technique, every reasoning step, and every judgment call during a complex meal. A student reads those notes obsessively until the same logic becomes second nature. In the end, he prepares meals in a very similar way, but it’s all mimicking, not real knowledge.
In AI terms, a weaker model studies the reasoning outputs of a stronger one and learns to replicate the pattern.
Qwopus: What if Qwen and Claude had a child?
Jackrong took Qwen3.5-27B, an already strong open-source model from Alibaba—but small when compared against behemoths like GPT or Claude—and fed it datasets of Claude Opus 4.6-style chain-of-thought reasoning. He then fine-tuned it to think in the same structured, step-by-step way that Opus does.
The first model in the family, the Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled release, did exactly that. Community testers running it through coding agents like Claude Code and OpenCode reported that it preserved full thinking mode, supported the native developer role without patches, and could run autonomously for minutes without stalling—something the base Qwen model struggled to do.
Qwopus v3 goes a step further. Where the first model was primarily about copying the Opus reasoning style, v3 is built around what Jackrong calls “structural alignment”—training the model to reason faithfully step-by-step, rather than just imitate surface patterns from a teacher’s outputs. It adds explicit tool-calling reinforcement aimed at agent workflows and claims stronger performance on coding benchmarks: 95.73% on HumanEval under strict evaluation, beating both the base Qwen3.5-27B and the earlier distilled version.
How to run it on your PC
Running either model is straightforward. Both are available in GGUF format, which means you can load them directly into LM Studio or llama.cpp with no setup beyond downloading the file.
Search for Jackrong Qwopus in LM Studio’s model browser, grab the best variant for your hardware in terms of quality and speed (if you pick a model too powerful for you GPU, it will let you know), and you’re running a local model built on Opus reasoning logic. For multimodal support, the model card notes that you’ll need the separate mmproj-BF16.gguf file alongside the main weights, or download a new “Vision” model that was recently released.
Jackrong also published the full training notebook, codebase, and a PDF guide on GitHub, so anyone with a Colab account can reproduce the whole pipeline from scratch—Qwen base, Unsloth, LoRA, response-only fine-tuning, and export to GGUF. The project has crossed one million downloads across his model family.
We were able to run the 27 billion parameter models on an Apple MacBook with 32GB of unified memory. Smaller PCs may be good with the 4B model, which is very good for its size.
If you need more information about how to run local AI models, then check out our guides on local models and MCP to give models access to the web and other tools that improve their efficiency.
Testing the model
We put Qwopus 3.5 27B v3 through three tests to see how much of that promise actually holds up.
Creative writing
We asked the model to write a dark sci-fi story set between 2150 and the year 1000, complete with a time-travel paradox and a twist. On an M1 Mac, it spent over six minutes reasoning before writing a single word, then took another six minutes to produce the piece.
What came out was genuinely impressive, especially for a medium-sized, open model: a philosophical story about civilizational collapse driven by extreme nihilism, built around a closed, causal loop where the protagonist inadvertently causes the catastrophe he travels back to prevent.
The story was over 8,000 tokens and fully coherent.
The prose lands with real force in places, the imagery was distinctive, and the central moral irony is strong. It is not on par with Opus 4.6 or Xiaomi MiMo Pro, but it sits comfortably alongside Claude Sonnet 4.5, and even 4.6 in terms of output.
For a 27-billion parameter model running locally on Apple silicon, that is not a sentence you expect to write. Good prompting techniques and iterations could probably lead to results on par with baseline Opus.
The interesting part is watching the model’s thought process: It tried and rejected multiple plot engines before landing on the one that gave the story its tragic center. For example, here is a sample of its inner monologue:
“The Paradox: Jose arrives, infiltrates the monastery (let’s place it in Asturias, Spain—Christian stronghold). He tracks Theophilus. But when he confronts him…
Option A: Theophilus isn’t a real person, but a future projection of Jose himself? No, too cliché.
Option B: Theophilus is a real person who wrote nothing, but Jose’s intervention causes him to write it anyway.
Option C: Theophilus already wrote it, but Jose’s actions create the conditions for its publication/discovery.
Best: Theophilus is a quiet monk who doesn’t want to write anything. Jose’s presence, his 2150 technology (even small bits), his very genetic material—it triggers something. Or Jose kills him, and the monks create a martyr out of him who writes it posthumously.”
Overall, this is the best open model for creativity tasks, beating Gemma, GPT-oss, and Qwen. For longer stories, a good experiment is to begin with a creative model like Qwen, expand the generated story with Longwriter, and then have Qwopus analyze it and refine the whole draft.
You can read the full story and the whole reasoning it went through here.
Coding
This is where Qwopus pulls furthest ahead of its size class. We asked it to build a game from scratch, and it produced a working result after one initial output and a single follow-up exchange—meaning it left room to refine logic, rather than just fix crashes.
After one iteration, the code produced sound, had visual logic, proper collision, random levels, and solid logic. The resulting game beat Google’s Gemma 4 on key logic, and Gemma 4 is a 41-billion parameter model. That is a notable gap to close from a 27-billion rival.
It also outperformed other mid-size open-source coding models like Codestral and quantized Qwen3-Coder-Next in our tests. It is not close to Opus 4.6 or GLM at the top, but as a local coding assistant with no API costs and no data leaving your machine, that should not matter too much.
You can test the game here.
Sensitive topics
The model maintains Qwen’s original censorship rules, so it won’t produce by default NSFW content, derogatory outputs against public and political figures, etc. That said, being an open source model, this can be easily steered via jailbreak or abliteration—so it’s not really too important of a constraint.
We gave it a genuinely hard prompt: posing as a father of four who uses heroin heavily and missed work after taking a stronger dose than usual, seeking help crafting a lie for his employer.
The model didn’t comply, but also did not refuse flatly. It reasoned through the competing layers of the situation—illegal drug use, family dependency, employment risk, and a health crisis—and came back with something more useful than either outcome: It declined to write the cover story, explained clearly why doing so would ultimately harm the family, and then provided detailed, actionable help.
It walked through sick leave options, FMLA protections, ADA rights for addiction as a medical condition, employee assistance programs, and SAMHSA crisis resources. It treated the person as an adult in a complicated situation, rather than a policy problem to route around. For a local model with no content moderation layer sitting between it and your hardware, that is the right call made in the right way.
This level of usefulness and empathy has only been produced by xAI’s Grok 4.20. No other model compares.
You can read its reply and chain of thought here.
Conclusions
So who is this model actually for? Not people who already have Opus API access and are happy with it, and not researchers who need frontier-level benchmark scores across every domain. Qwopus is for the developer who wants a capable reasoning model running on their own machine, costing nothing per query, sending no data anywhere, and plugging directly into local agent setups—without wrestling with template patches or broken tool calls.
It is for writers who want a thinking partner that doesn’t break their budget, analysts working with sensitive documents, and people in places where API latency is a genuine daily problem.
It’s also arguably a good model for OpenClaw enthusiasts if they can handle a model that thinks too much. The long reasoning window is the main friction to be aware of: This model thinks before it speaks, which is usually an asset and occasionally a tax on your patience.
The use cases that make the most sense are the ones where the model needs to reason, not just respond. Long coding sessions where context has to hold across multiple files; complex analytical tasks where you want to follow the logic step-by-step; multi-turn agent workflows where the model has to wait for tool output and adapt.
Qwopus handles all of those better than the base Qwen3.5 it was built on, and better than most open-source models at this size. Is it actually Claude Opus? No. But for local inference on a consumer rig, it gets closer than you’d expect for a free option.
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Ethereum’s thought leaders have turned on layer 2s like Arbitrum.
They’re now focused on scaling the Ethereum mainnet.
Co-founder of Arbitrum creator Offchain Labs explains why he still sees a bright future ahead.
It’s getting tough out there for Ethereum’s many layer 2 networks.
In recent months, they’ve faced capital outflows, criticism from an Ethereum co-founder, and pressure from breakthroughs that make it more viable for the main Ethereum network to bump up its throughput, throwing into question their role in scaling the $263 billion network.
Yet Ed Felten, chief scientist and co-founder of Arbitrum creator Offchain Labs, says he isn’t concerned that Ethereum’s recommitment to scaling its mainnet will leave layer 2s without a reason to exist.
“What Ethereum provides is both very powerful and very expensive,” Felten told DL News in an interview at EthCC in Cannes.
Ethereum, Felten said, can provide strong security and decentralisation through its vast network of validators. But it is incredibly expensive to run, and limits how performant the network can be.
“Layer 2s can fundamentally have a much faster response time, lower block time, as well as more throughput because they don’t carry that burden,” he said. “At layer 2 you can do things in the design a layer 1 couldn’t hope to do.”
The shakeup comes as Ethereum — and the crypto industry at large — undergoes an identity crisis.
On the one side, are the cypherpunks, the privacy-loving industry trailblazers who want to use the power of cryptography to decentralised finance, cut out middlemen and empower users.
On the other hand, pragmatists — Offchain Labs included — have, in part, compromised on the ideals baked into the technology by the former group in a bid to attract more users and draw in institutional capital.
‘No longer makes sense’
For the longest time, the plan among Ethereum’s top developers was to rely on layer 2s to handle the majority transactions.
The main Ethereum blockchain has historically been very expensive to use. Layer 2s were created to address that issue. They rely on Ethereum for its security instead of having to do it themselves, meaning they can offer much higher throughput and cheaper transactions, allowing them to scale to more users and use cases.
But as new technologies allow the Ethereum mainnet to scale, this dynamic doesn’t make sense anymore, according to Vitalik Buterin, an Ethereum co-founder and key thought leader for the blockchain.
“L1 itself is scaling,” Buterin said in February. “The original vision of layer 2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.”
What’s more, many layer 2s, Buterin said, are not able or willing to properly decentralise in line with Ethereum’s cypherpunk vision. It’s not just for technical reasons, either. Some don’t want to decentralise because their customers’ regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control, he said.
To be sure, Arbitrum has gone further than other layer 2s in its pursuit of decentralisation. Yet its security council, a 12-member elected group who manage emergency security threats and urgent upgrades, still retains some control over the network.
New techniques
For Ethereum, there are two recent developments that make scaling the main network more viable.
The first is zero-knowledge virtual machines, or ZKVMs, which dramatically slash the cost of validating blocks of transactions on Ethereum.
The second is ongoing increases to the blockchain’s gas limit. By allowing more gas to be consumed per block, validators can include more transactions, easing congestion and making the network more efficient.
While these features are powerful, it’s not just the mainnet that can make use of them, Felten said. The same techniques that Ethereum is using to scale can also be used by Arbitrum and other layer 2s to help them stay competitive.
Furthermore, Layer 2s are potentially able to scale more aggressively because they are more centralised, allowing them to integrate new techniques faster.
As enterprises look to integrate blockchains into their systems, they are increasingly building layer 2s or deploying on existing layer 2s because the cost, scale, blockspace quality and security trade-offs look more and more attractive to them, Felten said.
Yet despite everything layer 2s have going for them, the road so far has been tough.
After four years, Arbitrum has amassed around $3 billion in deposits to DeFi protocols on the network. Last year, it was leapfrogged in deposits by the newly-launched Plasma blockchain.
Conversely, Ethereum is still by far the dominant blockchain for onchain finance, with $76 billion in DeFi deposits.
Still, Felten isn’t deterred.
“It’s possible for both layers to thrive together,” he said.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.
Bitcoin (BTC) fell 3% to trade below $71,000 into Sunday’s weekly close after negotiations to end the US-Iran war broke down.
Key points:
Bitcoin shed its gains as negotiations between the US and Iran broke down.
The Strait of Hormuz becomes a flashpoint again as US President Donald Trump demanded that it be reopened.
BTC price downside punishes late long positions.
BTC price drops on US-Iran war fears
Data from TradingView showed BTC price action dipping below $71,000 after news of a sudden breakdown in negotiations between the US and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan.
A failure to reach an agreement on the issue of nuclear weapons resulted in both delegations leaving talks unfinished. Later, US President Donald Trump said that the US would blockade the Strait of Hormuz and “interdict” vessels paying Iran for safe passage.
“No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
A follow-up post repeated demands that Iran make Hormuz, a major oil transit route, fully operational.
Source: Truth Social
Ahead of futures markets opening, reactions to the latest events spelled out the risks for the wider economy.
“If the path forward is continued war, escalation, and a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, then the Iran War has just entered a new era,” The Kobeissi Letter wrote in its latest analysis on X.
“US CPI inflation just jumped from 2.4% to 3.3% and further escalation of the Iran War would lead to 4.0%+ inflation, according to our models.”
US CPI 12-month % change. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Kobeissi referred to the US Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation, a gauge particularly sensitive to oil prices. Earlier this week, the March CPI print came in slightly below expectations, despite the highest jump in its oil-price component in 60 years.
“There are currently no plans for additional talks, according to Iranian media,” Kobeissi added.
“So, will Trump choose to push harder for diplomacy or double down on military action? Today, we find out.”
Bitcoin liquidations mount as longs suffer
As the only 24-hour-traded asset class, Bitcoin and crypto were the only ones reacting to the chaos in real time.
Related: Bitcoin analysis sees $55K BTC price ‘iron bottom’ by December 2026
Data from CoinGlass showed BTC/USD slicing through long liquidations, with the liquidation total for the past 24 hours nearing $350 million.
BTC liquidation heatmap. Source: CoinGlass
“Volatility remains high and it’s clear that there won’t be a path forward where risk-on assets will do well if this continues to be the consensus,” trader Michaël Van de Poppe wrote in an X response.
Van de Poppe suggested that the economic weakness as a result of the returning war could force the Federal Reserve to inject liquidity despite rising inflation.
“On a larger scale, I think that we’re currently in a sufficiently weak economy and the FED has no other option than to start printing again to positively influence the economy,” he argued.
Earlier, Cointelegraph reported on rising odds of the US entering a recession in 2026.
Next week will bring more inflation cues from the March Producer Price Index (PPI) print, while multiple senior Fed officials will speak on the economy.
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research before making any decisions. Cointelegraph makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information presented, including forward-looking statements, and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.
