Crypto

A confluence of factors makes $60,000 as key level to watch for in the near term, according to Deribit.

The bug was patched within days, but developers acknowledged there's still no way to prove it was never exploited before the fix.

Tether-linked billionaire Christopher Harborne and BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo donated $9.4 million to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the first quarter. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK received 7 million British pounds ($9.4 million) from two crypto billionaires this year, with total funds raised outstripping all other political parties. The party received a $4 million donation from Christopher Harborne, who has a stake in the stablecoin issuer Tether, and a $5.4 million donation from Ben Delo, the co-founder of the crypto exchange BitMEX, according to Electoral Commission data released on Thursday. The Labour and Conservative parties each received around $5.4 million in the first quarter of the year.  Read more

“Less Bitcoin on levered DAT balance sheets and more on diversified corporate balance sheets will be a positive,” said Grayscale’s head of research, Zach Pandl. Strategy’s leveraged Bitcoin model is stressed, which could limit the firm’s ability to keep buying BTC and potentially force further sales, according to Grayscale. “The shift in approach from one of the world’s largest BTC holders has weighed on market sentiment,” said Zach Pandl, Grayscale’s head of research, on Thursday.  Michael Saylor’s Strategy sold 32 BTC on Monday, a tiny fraction of its total holdings of 843,706 BTC, but enough to rattle market sentiment as the asset has tanked by 16% since the sale.  Read more

AI bets are recording rapid profit-taking as Broadcom as outlook for AI-chip sales fell short of high expectations, driving down crypto markets.

Broadcom's disappointing AI chip outlook pulled the Nasdaq lower for a third session, dragged Asian equities down with it, and took crypto along for the ride.

Companies have been developing AI very quickly to stay ahead of the market, but Favaro and Clark argue that a slowdown would allow more time to deal with the technology’s implications. US-based AI firm Anthropic warns AI development is advancing at a pace that could soon see agents building, training and improving themselves without human input — recommending a slowdown in development. In a blog post published Thursday, Marina Favaro, lead at the Anthropic Institute, and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said agents can already run code themselves, delegate hours of work to other agents and could be on the cusp of taking over completely. “For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work,” they said. Read more

The end of another week has arrived, meaning more crypto options are expiring while spot markets have fallen to their lowest levels in months. 

Shielded Labs revealed that the bug could have helped an attacker print unlimited counterfeit tokens. That could have damaged trust in the token's supply and its value.

ZEC market capitalization fell by almost $3 billion over the past 24 hours following the disclosure of a critical vulnerability, despite it being patched already. The price of ZEC fell on Thursday after further details were disclosed of a critical counterfeiting vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard pool that could theoretically allow a bad actor to mint an unlimited amount of ZEC. According to a post on X, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who was engaged by Shielded Labs, discovered the bug on May 29 and disclosed it to the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which deployed an emergency response to fix the vulnerability with a hard fork activated on June 3.  However, there are new concerns about the extent to which the vulnerability, which has existed since May 2022, has been used, leading Zcash to fall more than 30% over the past 24 hours to $410 at the time of writing. Its market capitalization has shrunk by more than $3 billion. Read more

Senator Cynthia Lummis has led a group of lawmakers urging financial regulators for “fair capital treatment for on-balance sheet treatment of digital assets.” A group of Senate Republicans has urged US financial regulators to clarify the capital standards for companies engaged in crypto activities. Senator Cynthia Lummis said on Thursday that she led the group in sending a letter on May 27 to Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Travis Hill, and Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould. The letter commended the agencies’ guidance in March that clarified the capital treatment of tokenized securities, but urged them “to build on that progress to move towards a clear and fair capital treatment for on-balance sheet treatment of digital assets.” Read more

WLD flipped OKB and ICP on its way up.

FG Nexus began buying ETH on Ethereum's 10th anniversary but soon faced one of crypto's sharpest downturns.

US Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould and New York Representative Gregory Meeks sparred over Donald Trump’s influence on regulators he has nominated as president at a Thursday oversight hearing. Jonathan Gould, the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) nominated by Donald Trump, implied that the US president had not ordered him to approve or give special consideration to a national trust charter application tied to his family’s financial interests. In a Thursday hearing of the House Financial Service Committee on “oversight of prudential regulators,” New York Representative Gregory Meeks questioned Gould on the Trump family crypto company World Liberty Financial’s connections to foreign governments and the Binance exchange. The company, whose co-founders include Trump and his sons, applied for an OCC charter in January, prompting backlash from many Democratic lawmakers alleging conflicts of interest. Representative Gregory Meeks at a Thursday hearing. Source: House Financial Services Committee Read more

Anthropic says AI now writes most of its code and runs increasingly complex research tasks, leaving people to decide which problems are worth solving.

Rep. Bryan Steil said he'll add language to the House congressional stock ban bill to cover prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.

Bitcoin price collapsed as Strategy faced tighter liquidity conditions and paused its BTC buying. Is it time to jump ship, or buy the dip? Key takeaways: Bitcoin (BTC) faced a 21% price correction in 10 days, retesting the $61,000 level for the first time in 4 months. This movement coincided with Strategy (MSTR US) company's decision to buy back some corporate debt, temporarily pausing its Bitcoin accumulation. Traders now fear that Strategy could be forced to liquidate some of its Bitcoin holdings. Read more

Some observers noted that lower share prices and higher yields can create a feedback loop that may become harder for Strategy to manage.

Political activist Bill Browder, the teenager’s father, said his son was “the first high school student in the world to be sanctioned by an authoritarian regime” over a report on the ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5. Alexander Browder, the son of American-British political activist Bill Browder, said that he has been targeted by Russia over allegations that officials used the ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin to evade sanctions amid the country's war on Ukraine. In a Wednesday X post, Browder said his work through the website Global Cryptocurrency Laundering Database had resulted in him being “sanctioned by an authoritarian regime for uncovering corruption.” Specifically, he alleged in a March report that A7A5 was backed by deposits from Russian financial institution Promsvyazban and was used to circumvent Western sanctions stemming from Russia’s war on Ukraine. “The Ruble-backed stablecoin A7A5 is one of the most prevalent issues facing the West. It is sanctioned in the UK, US and EU but it still operates,” said Brow...

Demand for peptides fueled by the "looksmaxxing" trend has spawned a $100 million gray market paid for primarily with crypto.