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Cardano Shorts Pile Up As Weekly Rates Reach Multi-Year High

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Cardano Shorts Pile Up As Weekly Rates Reach Multi-Year High

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With the cryptocurrency market struggling with heightened volatility, the Cardano price has failed to bounce back strongly, sitting below the $0.30 level. Meanwhile, bearish sentiment around the leading altcoin has intensified, with investors betting steadily on a downward move rather than an upside trajectory in the short term.

Bearish Bets On Cardano Climb Sharply

Cardano’s sideways price performance over the past few weeks has sharply impacted the sentiment of investors toward the leading altcoin. This growing negative mood among investors is evidenced by their trading activity as they continue to lean to the downside, suggesting weakening confidence in ADA.

According to data from Santiment, a popular data analytics and market intelligence platform, ADA’s weekly shorting activity has climbed to its highest level in years. Specifically, Cardano’s funding rates on Binance, the leading trading platform, are at their highest ratio of short positions to long positions since June 2023. 

Cardano
Source: Chart from Santiment on X

Such action points to increased caution among a growing number of investors amid current market conditions. Santiment stressed that traders are obviously looking forward to the cryptocurrency asset continuing its decline in value in the short to medium term. 

Historically, this behavior has acted as a signal for a price bottom as funding rates are frequently known to fluctuate and move prices in the direction that traders are expecting the least.

ADA Traders Are Taking A Hit

Santiment also discussed the key MVRV (Market Value to Realized Value) Ratio, which has turned negative or dropped sharply, as volatility persists. Data from the 365-Day MVRV ratio shows that the average wallet address active on the Cardano network over the past year has attracted a return of -43%, which is well below average. 

The extremely low MVRV ratio typically indicates that ADA is in a buy or opportunity zone despite the altcoin’s significant drop in price by over 71% since September last year. In a zero-sum game, when average returns are severely negative, it is a sign that a turnaround is on the horizon, with coins often averaging 0% on the MVRV metric across all time frames. This trend also raises the possibility that the altcoin has reached a bottom or is getting closer to one. 

Meanwhile, when other traders are in excruciating discomfort, key stakeholders and skill investors are intrigued by this trend. The cautious mood from seasoned traders is due to the reduced risk of purchasing or adding to their positions.

Even with recent news regarding Cardano being listed among several digital assets that were classified as a commodity, not a security, by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), bullish sentiment has yet to return strongly. As pressure continues to build, speculation is whether this wave of short positioning by investors will strengthen the downward trend or pave the way for a potential squeeze before a bounce.

Cardano
ADA trading at $0.26 on the 1D chart | Source: ADAUSDT on Tradingview.com

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from Tradingview.com

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Bitwise Joins Lombard’s Bitcoin Smart Accounts

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Bitwise Joins Lombard’s Bitcoin Smart Accounts

Bitwise Asset Management has become the first strategic yield partner in Lombard’s Bitcoin Smart Accounts ecosystem, signaling a growing bridge between institutional custody and productive on-chain Bitcoin deployment. 

The collaboration is designed to unlock yield and liquidity for an estimated $500 billion in BTC currently held in regulated custody, without requiring asset transfers or modifications to existing custodial arrangements, Lombard said. 

Scheduled for a Q2 2026 launch, Bitcoin Smart Accounts will allow high-net-worth individuals, institutional asset managers, and corporate treasuries to earn yield or borrow against BTC while maintaining full control of their assets. 

Bitwise will provide institutional-grade yield strategies, combining DeFi lending with curated real-world asset portfolios, while Morpho will facilitate stablecoin liquidity for borrowing products.

Jacob Phillips, co-founder of Lombard, highlighted the significance of institutional adoption: “Following the February introduction of Bitcoin Smart Accounts, we’ve observed substantial demand for solutions that enable productive Bitcoin deployment while preserving existing custody. Bitwise brings the credibility and capabilities required to serve this market at scale.”

The partnership addresses longstanding operational inefficiencies in institutional Bitcoin markets. Traditionally, holders seeking liquidity faced three limited options: exiting custody, using opaque OTC lending channels, or selling assets — each presenting risk, cost, or lost upside. 

Lombard’s Smart Accounts leverage custodian-integrated infrastructure to recognize Bitcoin positions as collateral using cryptographic receipts (BTC.b) without transferring the underlying asset.

Generate returns while preserving bitcoin 

Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, framed the collaboration as a milestone for institutional Bitcoin: “We’re seeing growing demand for strategies that generate returns while preserving Bitcoin’s core properties. 

This partnership helps shape an ecosystem where BTC can function as productive, yield-generating capital while maintaining security and compliance standards.”

According to Horsley, the recent BTC rebound and dip is attracting institutional interest, with investors viewing sub-$70,000 levels as an opportunity to accumulate. While some retail traders remain cautious, looking for signs that the market has found a floor, larger investors are approaching the pullback with a different perspective.

Horsley believes long-term holders may feel uncertain during price drops, whereas institutions are seizing the chance to enter at levels they previously thought were out of reach. Some buyers are taking advantage of broader market weakness, as BTC becomes part of a wider selloff in liquid risk assets, creating renewed opportunities for accumulation.

The architecture for the collaboration is designed to scale. Each new custodian or protocol integration increases the utility of the system, creating network effects akin to those seen in ACH or SWIFT over decades. 

Lombard plans to expand custodian partnerships and whitelisted protocol integrations throughout 2026, aiming to mobilize hundreds of billions in institutionally held BTC into productive on-chain capital.

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Billionaire’s Startup Aims to Transform Personal AI

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Billionaire’s Startup Aims to Transform Personal AI

An ambitious new AI startup is creating a sizable buzz — not only because of what it promises to deliver, but also because of who is behind it.

Hark bills itself as an AI lab building “advanced personalized intelligence” that will work on a specifically designed new family of devices that are quite different from what the IT world is accustomed to.

While the product proposition is intriguing enough, interest has been amplified by the fact that the driving force behind Hark is serial innovator Brett Adcock, CEO of humanoid robotics vendor, and also founder of air taxi developer Archer Aviation and Vettery, an AI talent marketplace Adcock sold in 2018 for $110 million.

Adcock is now said to be worth $19 billion and has already reportedly provided Hark with $100 million in his own funds.

A press statement released to herald the arrival of Hark provided some clues as to what to expect, pointing to “next-generation hardware designed to serve as a universal interface between humans and machines.”

Related:OpenAI Needed to Cut Sora for Enterprise Strategy

It went on to say that, unlike companies that focus on just one layer of the AI stack, Hark is building foundation models, software systems, native hardware and new interfaces together from the outset.

“The AI systems I use today are far from my vision of what the future should be. We want to create intelligence that lets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you,” Adcock said in the statement. “To do this, we need to build the full stack of next-generation AI models and advanced hardware interfaces. [The] future only becomes possible when the entire stack is built together.”

He provided further detail in an interview with Bloomberg, saying: “We’re working on a family of AI devices both for yourself and for the home.” These devices would be “distinct from existing handsets, wearables and smart glasses,” he added.

In terms of what to expect from the models, Hark said they will integrate speech, text, vision, and contextual awareness, along with highly personalized memory systems. They will also target proactive behavior that can anticipate a user’s needs rather than wait for prompts, according to Hark.

Hardware-wise, it remains to be seen what Hark ultimately produces, but one clue is that Abidur Chowdhury, formerly a top designer for the iPhone at Apple, will shape the look, having been recruited as the startup’s design chief.

Chowdhury is one of a rapidly growing team of more than 45 designers, engineers and researchers already recruited from tech giants such as Meta, Tesla and Apple, while Hark also appears to have plenty of hardware at its disposal, with thousands of Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs set to come online in April to support multimodal pre-training and model post-training.

Related:Musk Reveals Chip Megaproject Spanning Tesla, SpaceX and XAI

Hark is also said to be working closely with Nvidia to expand his company’s infrastructure.

In terms of a timeframe, the startup’s first software and AI models are due in the summer, with the initial devices to follow.

 

 

Foundation says network is becoming core infrastructure for ‘agentic’ internet

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Foundation says network is becoming core infrastructure for ‘agentic’ internet

The Solana Foundation is positioning the network as core infrastructure for an emerging “agentic” internet, where AI systems—not humans—initiate and execute economic activity.

“AI is not really a vertical. It’s a platform shift… affecting everything across every industry, including crypto,” said Vibhu Norby, chief product officer of the Solana Foundation, during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York.

At the center of Solana’s strategy is payments. Norby said the network has already “processed 15 million payments onchain from agents,” largely tied to machine-to-machine commerce. “The programmatic aspect of crypto payments is what is making it interesting for agents,” he said, adding that “stablecoins are going to be the default thing that agents use to pay for any computational resource.”

This shift could fundamentally reshape internet business models, Norby believes. “Agentic payments are probably going to change the entire way that the internet is monetized,” he said, pointing to the ability to support sub-cent, pay-per-use transactions that traditional rails cannot handle.

The Solana Foundation argues that the network’s performance-focused design gives it an edge in this new paradigm. “Agents are cold, calculated machines… they don’t subscribe to crypto religiosity,” Norby said. “If you ask an agent what’s the best way to pay for something with crypto, most of the time, Solana is showing up at the top.”

At the same time, advances in AI are eroding long-standing developer barriers, noting that tools now allow developers and machines to build across ecosystems more easily.

In response, Solana developers are building directly for AI systems. “What agents like is APIs and documentation and skills,” Norby said, pointing to initiatives like machine-readable “skill” files and AI-first developer platforms.

Looking ahead, Norby expects a dramatic shift in user behavior: “The default way people will interact with crypto is going to be through their agent… 95 to 99% of all transactions… will be coming from LLMs.”

Read more: Solana Foundation taps Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay for institutional developer platform

Bitcoin Tests Key Level as Compression Builds Toward $80K

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Bitcoin Tests Key Level as Compression Builds Toward $80K

Bitcoin (BTC) is testing the $71,500 pivot, a key level across multiple timeframes and analysts noted that price action is tilted toward a possible rally to $80,000.

As traders remain split between futures-driven speculation and weak spot demand, Bitcoin has tested the $71,500 inflection point four times in the past seven days. A positive is that the price has held above the 50-period exponential moving average (EMA) on the four-hour chart, but the 50-day EMA on the daily chart continues to act as a level of resistance.

Will $80,000 be Bitcoin’s next stop?

Crypto trader Skew described the position as a “compression zone,” where the tightening price range and trading may lead to a strong directional move.

A bullish inverse head and shoulders pattern is also forming on the four-hour chart, with $71,500 acting as the neckline. 

BTC/USDT on the four-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

A confirmed breakout places the immediate technical target near monthly highs at $76,000, a 7.35% move from current levels. Market analyst Mikybull extends this projection toward $80,000.

Another onchain signal points to the possibility of a 10% to 14% Bitcoin rally. The seven-day standard deviation of short-term holder realized profit and loss flows to Binance dropped to 255 on March 24, returning to a level seen before prior rallies.

Coinbase, Cryptocurrencies, Business, Bitcoin Price, Markets, Cryptocurrency Exchange, Bitcoin Futures, Price Analysis, Market Analysis, Liquidity
Bitcoin’s short-term realized profit/loss pressure on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant

A similar reading near 277 on Feb. 27 was followed by a 14% rise, while a level around 289 in late December preceded a near 10% gain. The current compression shows a decline in sell-side volatility, with the short-term holder distribution becoming more controlled.

Related: Bitcoin holders shift from panic to cash-buffer discipline as volatility deepens

Bitcoin orderflow data remains split

The recent price strength followed market optimism tied to a potential ceasefire in the US and Israel-Iran war, but on Wednesday, Iran rejected the US peace proposal and outlined its own conditions for ending the conflict, according to the Kobeissi Letter.

BTC held steady through the update, while sensitivity to the US dollar strength and energy prices continues to guide short-term reactions.

The derivatives positioning shows increased activity. BTC open interest (in terms of USD) has risen by $500 million to $16.5 billion over the past 24 hours, with funding rates turning positive at 0.03% since Monday. The latest rally toward $70,000 was driven largely by futures markets. 

Coinbase, Cryptocurrencies, Business, Bitcoin Price, Markets, Cryptocurrency Exchange, Bitcoin Futures, Price Analysis, Market Analysis, Liquidity
BTC aggregated spot volume, open interest, Coinbase premium. Source: velo.data

The spot participation lags, with a weak aggregate cumulative volume delta of -$87 million and a negative Coinbase premium signaling softening US-based demand. Thus, the order flow data points to a distributive nature between buyers and sellers across the spot and futures markets. 

Skew explained that for Bitcoin to sustain a breakout above $71,500, the rally needs to be backed by stronger underlying demand, specifically, strong buyer support, steady accumulation, and continued absorption of selling pressure from short traders. 

Coinbase, Cryptocurrencies, Business, Bitcoin Price, Markets, Cryptocurrency Exchange, Bitcoin Futures, Price Analysis, Market Analysis, Liquidity
$60 million BTC bid filled. Source: Skew/X

A $60 million bid was filled during the New York session, highlighting renewed demand, but a clear follow-through is needed for the price to retain a bullish structure above $71,500.

Related: Bitcoin rebounds during Iran war, but safe haven role unproven