Home Blog Page 611

NYSE Parent Company Finalizes Polymarket Investment, Totaling $1.6 Billion

info@uweb3.io
-
0
NYSE Parent Company Finalizes Polymarket Investment, Totaling $1.6 Billion

In brief

  • ICE has invested another $600 million into Polymarket, fulfilling its commitment made in October.
  • Rival Kalshi recently raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, outpacing Polymarket’s current valuation.
  • Prediction markets face mounting regulatory pressure, with lawmakers moving to ban insider trading on the platforms.

New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange has completed its investment into prominent prediction market platform Polymarket, with the final total landing at $1.6 billion.

ICE said the new funding is part of an equity capital fundraising by Polymarket, and that the firm intends to purchase up to $40 million worth of Polymarket securities from existing holders.

The NYSE parent company made a commitment of up to $2 billion to Polymarket in October 2025 that valued the company at $9 billion. Back then, the company made a $1 billion initial investment. The additional $600 million and the plan to purchase securities from existing investors mean that the firm’s obligations to Polymarket have now been fulfilled.

Polymarket has been locked in a heated competition with rival platform Kalshi, even when it comes to fundraising.

Kalshi just raised $1 billion earlier this month in a round led by Coatue Management, at a $22 billion valuation—double its $11 billion valuation from a December round backed by Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, Ark Invest, and Sequoia.

Kalshi has been on a rapid fundraising tear since winning a CFTC court battle in May 2025. That cleared the way for its election contracts to be offered and the company to scale from a $2 billion valuation in June 2025 to its current $22 billion in under a year.

Polymarket recently put together a 3-day Washington D.C. pop-up experience, the Situation Room, which was billed as the world’s first brick-and-mortar destination for monitoring global prediction markets. It got mixed reviews from journalists in attendance—tech outlet Wired called it “a disaster,” due to the screens being off on opening night thanks to technical difficulties.

The investment comes as prediction markets face growing regulatory scrutiny in Washington and in multiple states.

Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton banned his staff from trading on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi this week, citing concerns about insider trading. The additional funding for Polymarket arrives a few weeks after bipartisan lawmakers introduced the PREDICT Act to extend similar restrictions to members of Congress, senior officials, and their families.

Separately, senators have proposed bans on sports contracts and war-related markets, following controversy over profitable bets tied to U.S. strikes on Iran and the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Also on Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to ban state officials and governor appointees from betting on prediction markets using insider info.

Daily Debrief Newsletter

Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

ECB Study Concludes DeFi DAOs Aren’t as Decentralized as They Claim

info@uweb3.io
-
0
ECB Study Concludes DeFi DAOs Aren’t as Decentralized as They Claim

A new working paper from the European Central Bank examined four major protocols and found that a small number of actors control the bulk of governance token holdings.

A European Central Bank working paper challenges the notion that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) deliver on their promise of distributed governance, finding that token holdings and voting power across four major DeFi protocols are heavily concentrated among a handful of actors.

The study examined governance structures at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap using data from late 2022 and mid-2023. The researchers analyzed the top 100 token holders and top 20 voters for each protocol, reviewed 248 governance proposals, and attempted to trace the real-world identities behind pseudonymous blockchain addresses.

The findings land at a moment when governance disputes are roiling some of the very protocols examined in the study, and DeFi projects more broadly are grappling with whether the Labs-plus-DAO structure is fit for purpose.

Top 100 Holders Command Over 80% of Supply

Across all four protocols, the top 100 holders controlled more than 80% of the total governance token supply during both snapshot periods. At Aave and Uniswap, the top five accounted for roughly half of all holdings. MakerDAO was the relative outlier, with the top five holding around 36%.

The concentration proved sticky over time, with distributions remaining largely unchanged between October 2022 and May 2023.

When the researchers dug into who sits behind the top addresses, they found that for most protocols, roughly half or more of holdings traced to addresses associated with the protocols themselves — encompassing treasuries, founders, and developer allocations — or to centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Protocol-associated addresses held 43% of Uniswap’s UNI supply. Centralized exchange holdings were particularly notable at Aave (16%) and Ampleforth (19%). Binance emerged as the dominant exchange holder across all four protocols, with holdings ranging from 2% to 15% of total supply.

The researchers cautioned that available data doesn’t distinguish between tokens held by exchanges on their own behalf versus those held in custody for customers.

Delegates Dominate Voting

The most active voters on governance proposals turned out to be predominantly delegates — entities to whom smaller token holders assign their voting power. This dynamic has long been a known issue in DAO governance, where low voter turnout and outsized whale participation leave a small group of recurring participants shaping protocol decisions.

The top voter at Uniswap in both snapshots was a16z, the venture capital firm, which saw its delegator count grow from 100 to 125 over the study period. At Aave, the protocol’s own smart contracts held the top-voter position.

Of the 68 top voters identified across all protocols, the researchers could not determine the identities of roughly one-third to nearly half of them. Among those they could identify, individuals made up about 21%, followed by Web3 companies at 19%, university blockchain societies, and VC firms.

Uniswap had the highest delegation rate at 27%, with its top 18 voters holding more than half the delegated power.

The ECB team also systematically categorized the 248 proposals and found that “risk parameters” — covering loan-to-value ratios, liquidation thresholds, borrowing rates, and debt ceilings — were the most common, accounting for 28%. Asset listing proposals made up 23%.

Implications for Regulation

The findings carry direct implications for the ongoing policy debate over how to regulate DeFi. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation exempts services provided in a “fully decentralized manner,” but the ECB researchers argue the protocols they studied fall well short of that standard.

Governance token holders, protocol developers, and centralized exchanges have frequently been proposed as potential regulatory entry points. However, the researchers concluded that the ambiguity surrounding who actually controls governance makes all three difficult to use in practice.

“It is not always clear who in the end is responsible or can be held accountable based on publicly available data,” the authors wrote.

The paper also drew parallels between DeFi governance and traditional corporate shareholder governance, noting that both systems suffer from low voter turnout and outsized influence by a small number of recurring participants.

But DeFi lacks the institutional safeguards — proxy voting rules, stewardship codes, disclosure requirements, and fiduciary obligations — that help mitigate those dynamics in public companies. As DAOs increasingly adopt formal legal structures, the researchers suggested that hybrid models integrating traditional legal frameworks with blockchain-based governance may ultimately be needed.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

How AI is Rewiring Global B2B Commerce

info@uweb3.io
-
0
How AI is Rewiring Global B2B Commerce

The financial technology landscape is undergoing a profound paradigm shift. For the past two years, the conversation has been dominated by Generative AI—models designed to draft emails, write code, and synthesize data. However, the true disruption for global commerce lies in the next evolutionary step: Agentic AI. We are moving from artificial intelligence that simply “advises” to AI that “executes.”

In the financial sector, this transition gives rise to Agentic Payments—a framework where autonomous AI agents negotiate pricing, select optimal routing networks, and execute B2B settlements with zero human intervention. As enterprises increasingly deploy AI to manage supply chains and procurement, traditional payment gateways are proving inadequate. The market now demands a fundamentally new payment infrastructure—one built natively for machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction.

The Friction in Traditional Global Payments

To understand the necessity of agentic payments, we must examine the bottlenecks of the current B2B payment architecture. Today’s global commerce is still hindered by fragmented banking networks, batch-processing delays, and UI-heavy portals designed for human operators.

When an enterprise deploys an AI agent to optimize its inventory, the AI can predict stock shortages and independently order materials from a supplier. Yet, when it comes to the final step—moving the funds—the autonomous workflow breaks. The AI hits a wall of manual approvals, complex KYC/AML check-boxes, and incompatible banking APIs. Traditional payment rails were built for human pacing, requiring manual data entry, physical security tokens, or complex multi-step authentications that an AI agent simply cannot navigate efficiently.

For autonomous commerce to scale, the payment layer must become invisible, instant, and entirely API-driven. AI agents do not need user-friendly dashboards; they need robust, machine-readable financial protocols that allow them to query balances, execute transactions, and reconcile ledgers in milliseconds.

Building the Foundation: Trust, Security, and Programmability

The most significant hurdle in adopting agentic payments is not technological, but psychological and regulatory: How do we trust an AI with the corporate treasury?

The answer lies in Programmable Payments and strict Autonomy Gates. Before an AI agent can execute a transaction, the underlying financial infrastructure must support highly granular, programmable logic. Enterprise finance teams need the ability to hard-code spending limits, velocity constraints, and approved counterparties directly into the payment rail.

For instance, an AI agent might be granted the autonomy to pay cloud infrastructure bills up to $50,000 automatically, but any payment exceeding that threshold, or directed to a newly onboarded vendor, would trigger a smart contract requiring cryptographic human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval.

Furthermore, compliance must be shifted left. Modern payment networks must integrate real-time, AI-driven KYC and AML screening directly into their APIs, ensuring that every micro-transaction executed by an autonomous agent is instantly audited and fully compliant with international financial regulations.

Pioneering the Infrastructure for AI Commerce

Recognizing this seismic shift, the most forward-thinking fintech platforms are rapidly re-architecting their systems. The goal is no longer just moving money, but providing the orchestration layer for autonomous financial operations (FinOps).

A prime example of this evolution is PhotonPay, a global payment platform that is actively pivoting its infrastructure to support agentic workflows. Recognizing that the future of B2B commerce will be driven by software agents, PhotonPay is developing deeply programmable, API-first payment rails designed specifically for machine execution.

Rather than relying on legacy batch processing, platforms evolving in this direction focus on real-time data synchronization and smart routing. PhotonPay’s architecture is being engineered to allow enterprise AI systems to seamlessly plug into a unified global treasury. This means an AI procurement agent could theoretically use the platform’s API to analyze real-time liquidity, split a massive vendor payment into multiple optimized tranches, and execute the settlement instantly—all while adhering to pre-defined corporate governance rules.

By building native interoperability for AI agents, PhotonPay is addressing the critical missing link in autonomous commerce: an intelligent, secure, and fully programmable financial execution layer.

The Road Ahead: Embracing Autonomous FinOps

The transition to agentic payments is not a distant futuristic concept; the foundational building blocks are being deployed today. As AI agents become standard components of enterprise ERP systems, supply chain management, and corporate treasuries, the friction of legacy payment rails will become an unacceptable business liability.

For fintech leaders, banking executives, and corporate CFOs, the mandate is clear. The next decade of financial technology will not be won by those who build the best user interfaces for humans, but by those who build the most secure, programmable, and scalable payment infrastructure for machines.

The dawn of agentic commerce is here. It is time to ensure your payment stack is ready for the autonomous future.

Anthropic’s ‘Most Capable’ AI Model Claude Mythos Leaks, Deemed Major Cybersecurity Threat

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Anthropic’s ‘Most Capable’ AI Model Claude Mythos Leaks, Deemed Major Cybersecurity Threat

In brief

  • A leaked draft post revealed Anthropic’s most powerful AI model, Claude Mythos.
  • The model also appears to introduce a new tier above Opus, internally referred to as “Capybara.”
  • Cybersecurity stocks declined after reports suggested the system could accelerate AI-driven cyberattacks.

Claude creator Anthropic is developing a new AI model called Claude Mythos, described internally as the company’s most capable model to date, with draft materials about the system being leaked online this week.

The existence of the model was first reported by Fortune on Thursday after unpublished files tied to Anthropic’s blog were discovered in a publicly accessible data cache. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the existence of the model to the publication.

“We’re developing a general purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune. “Given the strength of its capabilities, we’re being deliberate about how we release it. As is standard practice across the industry, we’re working with a small group of early access customers to test the model. We consider this model a step change and the most capable we’ve built to date.”

In an archived development page reviewed by Decrypt, Anthropic called Mythos “the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed.”

“Mythos is a new name for a new tier of model: larger and more intelligent than our Opus models—which were, until now, our most powerful,” Anthropic wrote. “We chose the name to evoke the deep connective tissues that link together knowledge and ideas.”

According to Anthropic, Mythos scored “dramatically higher” than Claude Opus 4.6 on tests of software coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity.

The leak of Mythos appears to have originated from draft materials stored in an unsecured content management system. According to Fortune, Anthropic restricted public access to the data store after being notified that the files were searchable online. The company attributed the exposure to human error in the configuration of its CMS tools.

However, Anthropic’s documents labeled Mythos as version one of the new model, and described version two internally as “Capybara,” which the company also positioned above its current top-tier Opus models.

The draft materials also highlighted concerns about the system’s potential cybersecurity implications.

“Although Mythos is currently far ahead of any other AI model in cyber capabilities, it presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders,” the company wrote.

Because of those risks, the company said it plans to release the model cautiously, beginning with a limited early-access rollout aimed at organizations working on cybersecurity defense.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

While Anthropic took down the blog post, news of the leak quickly spilled into financial markets.

Shares of several cybersecurity firms dropped after the reports surfaced, including Palo Alto Networks (PANW), which fell about 7%, and CrowdStrike (CRWD), which dropped roughly 6.4%. Meanwhile, Zscaler (ZS) declined around 5.8%, and Fortinet (FTNT) slipped about 4% during Friday trading, according to Yahoo Finance.

The selloff reaction echoes a similar market response to the reveal of a new Anthropic product. In February, Anthropic unveiled Claude Cowork, an AI system designed to automate complex workplace tasks—including contract review and compliance—which triggered a broad sell-off across software and professional-services companies.

That sell-off erased roughly $285 billion in market value as investors reassessed the long-term impact of AI agents on enterprise software businesses.

“The market’s response was a signal, not that AI agents will immediately replace these businesses, but that investors are finally pricing in the structural risk that foundation model providers can now compete directly with the software layer,” Nexatech Ventures founder Scott Dylan told Decrypt at the time. “That’s a polite way of saying if Anthropic can build a legal workflow tool in-house, what’s stopping them from doing the same for finance, procurement, or HR?”

Daily Debrief Newsletter

Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

Mistral AI Launches Text-to-Speech Model

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Mistral AI Launches Text-to-Speech Model

Mistral AI is expanding its Voxtral model family with its first text-to-speech model.

The launch comes amid intensifying competition in the fast-growing AI voice market, with Voxtral TTS pitched as an alternative to models from competitors including OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

The Paris-based startup unveiled its new system on Thursday. The 4 billion parameter model is designed for enterprise deployment across voice assistants, customer support and sales engagement tools. 

Unlike many rival offerings, Voxtral TTS has been released with open weights, allowing organizations to run the model on their own infrastructure rather than relying on third-party APIs.

The model supports nine languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi and Arabic.

Mistral said the model is lightweight enough to operate on consumer hardware, including laptops, smartphones and edge devices, while maintaining what it describes as “frontier-quality” performance. The company positions this as a key differentiator for enterprises seeking greater control over data, cost and customization.

Related:Cohere Unveils Open Source Speech Model for Edge Devices

 

Another key feature, Mistral said, is voice adaptability. The model can replicate a speaker’s voice using just a few seconds of reference audio, capturing not only tone but also accent, intonation and emotion.

“Our model excels at both contextual understanding and speaker modeling: capturing how a specific person naturally speaks,” Mistral wrote in a blog post. “With its compact size, low cost and latency and easy adaptability, Voxtral TTS gives full control and customization for enterprises looking to own their voice AI stack.”

Voxtral TTS can also perform cross-language voice control, such as generating English speech with a French accent, based on a short prompt.

In human evaluations of Voxtral, Mistral said its system matched or outperformed competing systems in terms of naturalness, exceeding lower-latency models from ElevenLabs while achieving parity with more advanced offerings in lifelike interaction.

The launch builds on Mistral’s earlier release of speech-to-text models and signals a broader push toward multimodal AI systems. 

BTC price drops to two-week low as $300 million in longs are liquidated

info@uweb3.io
-
0
BTC price drops to two-week low as $300 million in longs are liquidated

The crypto market tumbled to the lowest levels in more than two weeks, with bitcoin BTC$65,649.96 dropping below $67,000 and ether (ETH) closing in on $2,000. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) lost 2.2% since midnight UTC, reaching its lowest since March 9.

The fall coincided with a drop in U.S. equities. Nasdaq 100 futures are now trading at 23,760, 10% below this year’s high from January.

The risk-off atmosphere was spurred by rising oil prices and fears that the war in Iran would not de-escalate as quickly as many had hoped. Oil remains above $100 per barrel, stoking inflation concerns.

Sections of the altcoin market were harder hit on Friday, with the likes of ETHFI losing 6% since midnight. WLD, WIF, SEI and FET all lost between 3.6% and 4.7%.

Derivatives positioning

  • Long crypto futures bets, or bullish positions on market direction, bore the brunt of liquidations over the past 24 hours, with nearly $300 million liquidated, compared with just $50 million in short positions.
  • That’s the fifth time in 10 days the longs have neared that level of punishment, an indication traders were predominantly positioned for the Iran war to translate into a price rally that has not materialized.
  • XRP’s price fell over 2.5% in 24 hours, while open interest in futures has increased by 2% to 1.95 billion XRP, the most since Feb. 2.
  • That combination represents renewed investor interest in shorting the falling market. Negative cumulative volume delta and sub-zero funding rates suggest the same.
  • Futures tied to bitcoin, solana, dogecoin and BNB displayed an XRP-like bearish profile.
  • Memecoin SHIB has the largest negative open-interest–adjusted cumulative volume delta among major tokens, signaling aggressive derisking, or shorting, by traders.
  • Canton Network’s CC token stood out with positive funding rates and an increase in futures OI, both signaling growing demand for bullish exposure.
  • Bitcoin and ether’s 30-day implied volatility indices, BVIV and EVIV, continued to drop despite weak spot prices, suggesting that traders aren’t panicking yet and do not anticipate a turbulent selloff.
  • On Deribit, bitcoin options worth over $15 billion expired early Friday. So, the supposed expiry-related price magnet of $75,000 is no longer valid, which opens doors for deeper declines amid a worsening macro outlook.
  • Bitcoin and ether puts are again trading at 6 to 8 volatility premium to calls across all expirations, risk reversal shows. It indicates sticky demand for downside protection.

Token talk

  • The altcoin market showed its fragility again on Friday, failing to cling on to key levels of support in a low-liquidity trading environment.
  • The CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) was the worst-performing benchmark, tumbling by 2.3% while the bitcoin-dominant CoinDesk 20 (CD20) dropped 1.2%.
  • One token that bucked the bearish trend was ONDO, which rose after Ondo Finance, an asset management company, said it agreed to tokenize five Franklin Templeton exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and bring them to the Ondo Chain.
  • The token is up by more than 8% in the past 24 hours, although it gave back some of those gains since midnight UTC.
  • The average relative strength index (RSI) across all crypto tokens remains neutral despite the selloff, suggesting further declines are likely on Friday.

Sudoswap token jumps 225% as traders rush to profit from DAO ‘rage quit’ proposal – DL News

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Sudoswap token jumps 225% as traders rush to profit from DAO ‘rage quit’ proposal – DL News

  • Sudoswap gets a “rage quit” proposal.
  • It caused the SUDO token to soar in value.
  • Those buying the token are hoping to profit if the proposal passes a vote.

Traders have pushed up the price of a forgotten crypto token over 225% following a proposal to distribute leftover assets held by the DeFi protocol it governs to holders.

On Thursday, a pseudonymous delegate who goes by statelayer Sudoswap’s decentralised autonomous organisation, or DAO, published a proposal that would claim approximately $800,000 in fees accumulated by the protocol and allow DAO members to exchange their tokens for a portion of it.

Sudoswap is an onchain automated market maker for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, built on Ethereum.

If the proposal passes a vote, it will let holders redeem each SUDO token they own for around $0.03 worth of Ether — triple the market value of SUDO tokens before the proposal was revealed.

Those buying up SUDO are hopeful that the proposal will pass, yielding them a return of around 225% per token.

“The rage quit smart contract has no time limit, and is opt-in,” the proposal said. “SUDO may be exchanged for ETH at the fixed rate as long as sufficient ETH remains in the smart contract.”

The scheme is the latest example of what in DeFi is termed a “rage quit” — where token holders of old, forgotten DeFi protocols propose liquidating any remaining funds the protocol holds and distributing them to token holders, effectively dissolving the organisations.

In 2023, holders of Hector Network’s token voted to dissolve its DAO following claims of mismanagement. The protocol later entered receivership, with some assets clawed back.

The same year, token holders at Solana-based Parrot Protocol also voted through a similar dissolution.

DAO rage quitting is similar to another manoeuvre called raiding.”

Here, activist investors target DeFi protocols where the value of assets held by the DAO is greater than the market value of its governance token. The investors buy up the protocol’s token and use the voting power it confers to push through a proposal to liquidate the DAO, allowing them to profit.

NFT exchange

Sudoswap allows users to buy and sell NFTs instantly from liquidity pools — like decentralised exchange Uniswap — rather than relying on peer-to-peer order books, like OpenSea.

The project launched in July 2022 and introduced the SUDO governance token in early 2023 through an airdrop to early users and liquidity providers.

The protocol found some success, generating almost $5 million in fees over its lifetime, according to DefiLlama data.

However, as interest in NFTs plummeted throughout 2023 and 2024, so too did interest in Sudoswap. Use of the protocol dried up, and the SUDO token plummeted in value.

Sudoswap’s token is down 99% from its all-time high.

In addition to distributing Sudoswap fees, the proposal will also prevent users from minting more SUDO tokens by transferring ownership of its smart contracts to the burn address. This, statelayer said, will remove the risk of a potential governance attack.

The vote to distribute the Sudoswap fees will begin on March 28. Token holders have three days to cast their votes.

Sudoswap founder Owen Shen, who goes by 0xmons online, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Black Hat Asia

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Black Hat Asia

Apr 21, 2026 TO Apr 24, 2026

|

Singapore

Black Hat Asia returns to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore with a four-day program featuring specialized cybersecurity Trainings with courses for all skill levels, a Summit Day, and the two-day main conference. Black Hat Asia 2026 will feature Briefings by experts from around the world presenting the latest research in cybersecurity risks, developments and trends, dozens of open-source tool demos in Arsenal, a robust Business Hall, networking opportunities, social events, and much more. Use code: DARKREADING to get a Free Business pass or save S$200 on a Briefings pass.

Ondo, CC sidestep macro concerns with institutional deals as BTC, ETH prices slide: Crypto Daybook Americas

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Ondo, CC sidestep macro concerns with institutional deals as BTC, ETH prices slide: Crypto Daybook Americas

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)

Bearish macro headlines dominate crypto market sentiment, as they have done for most of the month, but concrete updates advancing mainstream blockchain adoption still have the ability to resonate with investors.

That’s evident from the 7% gain in Canton Network’s CC token over the past 24 hours. It’s the second-best-performing top-100 token by market value, behind Ondo Network’s ONDO token, which has risen 9%.

CC’s upswing follows Visa’s announcement that it joined Canton Network as a super validator, helping secure and validate transactions on the blockchain.

The move is pivotal because it brings a global payments giant onto a privacy-preserving network specifically built for institutions that want to transact on the blockchain without exposing sensitive data to other network participants.

Visa will help “extend privacy‑preserving blockchain infrastructure to banks and financial institutions around the world,” the firm said in an official announcement.

Privacy is widely seen as a key requirement for broader institutional adoption of the technology. At Consensus Hong Kong in February, investment banking giant JPMorgan and crypto firms Abraxas and B2C2 emphasized the need for privacy-preserving infrastructure, noting that institutions are unlikely to transact at scale on fully transparent networks where sensitive financial data could be exposed.

ONDO, too, is rallying primarily due to its pole position in the real-world asset tokenization sector, underscored by the early-week news of its partnership with Franklin Templeton to tokenize traditional assets.

The broader market remains under pressure due to geopolitical tensions and oil prices, which have traders pricing a Fed rate hike in two weeks.

Bitcoin BTC$66,090.44 has dropped over 3% to $66,800 alognside similar losses in ether (ETH) and XRP (XRP). Solana’s SOL token fell over 5% and the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) lost 3% decline.

According to Marex, renewed outflows from spot ETFs are weighing on bitcoin.

“ETF outflows have returned in size, which removes a steady bid from the tape and makes dips feel less protected,” Marex’s analysts said in a morning note.

They added that with the quarterly options expiry out of the way, the market is more exposed to the real catalysts again: oil, war headlines, rates and risk appetite.

Speaking of risk appetite, it could remain weak as government bond yields across the advanced world, including the U.S. and Japan, are rising again. Stay alert!

Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today

What to Watch

For a more comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead”.

  • Crypto
  • Macro
    • March 27, 10:00 a.m.: U.S. Michigan Consumer Sentiment Final for March est. 55.5 (Prev. 56.6)
  • Earnings (Estimates based on FactSet data)
    • March 27: Sphere 3D (ANY), post-market, -$4.68
    • March 27: Bonk Inc (BNKK), post-market
    • March 27: Mawson Infrastructure Group (MIGI), post-market, -$10.40
    • March 27: ZeroStack (ZSTK), post-market, -$1.97

Token Events

For a more comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead”.

  • Governance votes & calls
  • Unlocks
  • Token Launches

Conferences

For a more comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead”.

Market Movements

  • BTC is down 6.13% from 4 p.m. ET Thursday at $66,329.42 (24hrs: -4.44%)
  • ETH is down 8.13% at $1,987.25 (24hrs: -4.27%)
  • CoinDesk 20 is down 3.34% at 1,909.22 (24hrs: -3.86%)
  • Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is unchanged at 2.74%
  • BTC funding rate is at -0.0097% (-10.5930% annualized) on Binance
  • DXY is up 0.10% at 100.00
  • Gold futures are unchanged at $4,460.60
  • Silver futures are unchanged at $68.82
  • Nikkei 225 closed down 0.43% at 53,373.07
  • Hang Seng closed up 0.38% at 24,951.88
  • FTSE is down 0.69% at 9,902.97
  • Euro Stoxx 50 is down 1.39% at 5,488.69
  • DJIA closed on Thursday down 1.01% at 45,960.11
  • S&P 500 closed down 1.74% at 6,477.16
  • Nasdaq Composite closed down 2.38% at 21,408.08
  • S&P/TSX Composite closed down 1.53% at 31,887.52
  • S&P 40 Latin America closed up 0.44% at 3,481.68
  • U.S. 10-Year Treasury rate is up 9 bps at 4.42%
  • E-mini S&P 500 futures are down 0.51% at 6,492.00
  • E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are down 0.71% at 23,624.25
  • E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index are down 0.48% at 46,009.00

Bitcoin Stats

  • BTC Dominance: 58.49% (-0.61%)
  • Ether-bitcoin ratio: 0.02996 (0.07%)
  • Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 994 EH/s
  • Hashprice (spot): $31.97
  • Total fees: 2.37 BTC / $164,687
  • CME Futures Open Interest: 118,140 BTC
  • BTC priced in gold: 15.1 oz.
  • BTC vs gold market cap: 4.44%

Technical Analysis

Bitcoin's daily price swings in candlestick format. (TradingView)
Bitcoin slides to key trendline support. (TradingView)
  • The chart shows bitcoin’s daily price swings in candlestick format since July last year.
  • BTC has slipped to support of the trendline from Feb. 6 low, characterizing the price bounce within the broader downtrend.
  • Should the support give way, we could see a deeper selloff that could test dip demand around February lows near $60,000.
  • The latest pattern is similar to the one seen through December and January, which ended up deepening the selloff.

Crypto Equities

  • Coinbase Global (COIN): closed on Thursday at $173.38 (–4.26%), –1.72% at $170.39 in pre-market
  • Galaxy Digital (GLXY): closed at $19.61 (–8.06%), –1.33% at $19.35
  • MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $8.58 (+3.62%), –0.58% at $8.53
  • Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $14.01 (–7.62%), –0.18% at $13.98
  • Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $15.79 (–7.39%), –0.51% at $15.71
  • CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $9.30 (–6.63%), –0.54% at $9.25
  • Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $6.85 (–6.04%)
  • CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $37.08 (–7.99%)
  • Circle Internet Group (CRCL): closed at $98.27 (–5.38%), –2.35% at $95.96
  • Bullish (BLSH): closed at $36.44 (–2.64%), –0.93% at $36.10

Crypto Treasury Companies

  • Strategy (MSTR): closed at $132.93 (–4.46%), –0.99% at $131.61
  • Strive Asset Management (ASST): closed at $10.41 (–4.06%), –1.15% at $10.29
  • SharpLink Gaming (SBET): closed at $6.53 (–10.30%), –0.61% at $6.49
  • Upexi (UPXI): closed at $1.07 (–10.08%), +1.87% at $1.09
  • Lite Strategy (LITS): closed at $1.16 (–3.33%)

ETF Flows

Spot BTC ETFs

  • Daily net flows: -$171.3 million
  • Cumulative net flows: $56.14 billion
  • Total BTC holdings ~1.29 million

Spot ETH ETFs

  • Daily net flows: -$92.5 million
  • Cumulative net flows: $11.6 billion
  • Total ETH holdings ~5.76 million

Source: Farside Investors

While You Were Sleeping

Bitcoin Preps Sixth Red Month in a Row as Oil Fears Surge

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Bitcoin Preps Sixth Red Month in a Row as Oil Fears Surge

Bitcoin (BTC) neared $66,000 at Friday’s Wall Street open as analysis called US inflation trends “objectively unsustainable.”

Key points:

  • Bitcoin drops further on oil-supply woes as Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz.

  • BTC price performance is set to seal its sixth straight month of losses at the March close.

  • Traders eye the lows with $70,000 back as resistance.

Oil squeeze creates US bond-market havoc

Data from TradingView captured ongoing BTC price losses, which approached 4% on the day and threatened to turn March into Bitcoin’s sixth consecutive “red” month.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Macro headlines drove weakness across risk assets. US stocks opened downward after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, sharpening nerves over global oil supplies.

With the US-Iran war set to extend into April, markets showed stress everywhere — including US bonds.

“The US bond market is in major trouble today,” trading resource The Kobeissi Letter warned in a post on X.

Kobeissi noted that the 10-year Treasury note was now at its highest levels since the war began, creating a major headache for the Federal Reserve as it tries to tame inflation as labor-market conditions worsen.

“In less than one month, markets have gone from discussing rate cuts to rate hikes, with the base case showing a Fed PAUSE for the next 18 months,” it continued. 

“Keep in mind, the Fed was cutting interest rates because the labor market was weak, and it remains weak. However, inflation expectations have just become an even bigger problem than the labor market. This is objectively unsustainable.”

Federal Reserve target rate probabilities (screenshot). Source: CME Group FedWatch Tool

As Cointelegraph reported, oil prices have a pronounced impact on US inflation trends, while markets have also raised expectations of recession hitting in 2026.

“Inflation expectations have become so bad that the market is trading like an emergency Fed rate hike is imminent,” Kobeissi founder Adam Kobeissi added.

US two-year bond chart. Source: Adam Kobeissi/X

Bitcoin price resistance settles in at $70,000

Among Bitcoin traders, the mood was just as wary as BTC/USD circled its lowest levels in three weeks.

Related: Bitcoin value ‘off the chart’ as BTC price metric hits record lows in 2026

Analyzing four-hour time frames, Telegram trading resource Technical Crypto Analyst predicted a “likely” return to $64,000 next.

“BTC has clearly broken its ascending trendline and is now showing lower highs under the 70–72K supply, confirming a short-term bearish shift; with price losing the 68K support, continuation toward the 64–65K demand zone is likely, and only a reclaim above 70K would invalidate the bearish momentum,” it told subscribers.

BTC/USDT perpetual contract four-hour chart. Source: Crypto Technical Analyst/Telegram

Data from CoinGlass revealed the high stakes for price into the March monthly close, with BTC/USD readying its first six straight months of losses since the end of its 2018 bear market.

BTC/USD monthly returns (screenshot). Source: CoinGlass

“Indeed seeing the market derisking into the weekend as expected and as we’ve been seeing several weeks now,” trader Daan Crypto Trades continued. 

“Eyes on that $65.6K low from last week Monday. Main area to watch for me will be the range low. Seeing there’s still quite a bit of liquidity around that area.”

BTC/USDT perpetual contract four-hour chart. Source: Daan Crypto Trades/X