NYDIG’s Greg Cipolaro says a sale below market price and giving up millions of dollars for immediate execution indicates a large directional holder exited a trade on BlackRock’s IBIT last week. A $1.26 billion block trade in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) made last week was likely a whale making a quick exit on a directional trade, says Greg Cipolaro, the head of research at financial services company NYDIG. On Tuesday, an unknown trader sold 29.2 million shares of BlackRock’s IBIT on a dark pool, a private trading platform that institutions use to discreetly make large trades outside public markets, sparking speculation about who made the trade and why. Cipolaro said in a research note on Friday that several indicators were “consistent with a large directional holder exiting a concentrated position rather than a contemporaneous basis-trade unwind.” Read more
The transition gives the asset manager control of a tokenized fund that combines crypto carry trades with Treasury and digital asset exposure. Bitwise completed its takeover of Superstate's Crypto Carry Fund (USCC), giving the asset manager control of a tokenized investment vehicle that uses market-neutral crypto trading strategies to generate yield. Bitwise said on May 7 it would assume management of the fund from Superstate as the infrastructure company shifted its focus toward FundOS, its tokenized fund platform. The fund is available to qualified purchasers and seeks to generate yield through crypto cash-and-carry trades, a strategy that captures the premium between cryptocurrency futures and spot prices. It retains the USCC token ticker and existing smart contracts following the transition. Read more
The crypto bank's new CMS platform lets institutions trade on crypto venues while keeping assets in regulated custody and reducing pre-funded accounts. Anchorage Digital launched a settlement platform that allows institutions to trade on crypto venues while keeping assets in custody at its federally regulated bank, which it said will help manage counterparty and operational risks. According to Monday’s announcement from the company, Coordinated Multiparty Settlement (CMS) connects trading venues, prime brokers and institutional clients through a shared settlement layer while keeping assets at Anchorage Digital Bank throughout the trade lifecycle. Anchorage said CMS verifies funding obligations and coordinates settlement across participants, reducing the number of asset transfers needed to complete trades. The company said the system is designed to reduce the need for pre-funded exchange accounts, a common practice in crypto markets. Read more
The Sui Network's first two outages were caused by bugs introduced in its 1.72 update, while an interim fix deployed to restore the blockchain triggered the third. The Sui Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Sui Network, says it has made a “major upgrade” to address issues that caused three recent outages and left the blockchain down for more than 15 hours across two days. Sui experienced an outage on Thursday that lasted nearly six hours and two more on Friday. The first lasted eight hours and 25 minutes while the second lasted 43 minutes, according to the Sui network's uptime dashboard. All systems are listed as operational as of Monday. The Sui Foundation said in a blog post on Sunday that it applied an upgrade to fix the bugs that caused the outages. It also flagged several issues for improvement, such as better failure containment, end-of-epoch resilience and further investment in artificial intelligence agents, which helped with diagnoses, querying validator logs and assembling metrics. Re...