Sabrina Carpenter leaned into a “Thelma & Louise” theme with her weekend-two Coachella appearance Friday by featuring Geena Davis reading the mid-show monologue as an older “Aunt Sabrina,” succeeding last weekend’s guest Susan Sarandon.
The monologue was half the length of Sarandon’s uncomfortably overlong version last weekend, lending credence to rumors that Sarandon had been asked to stretch and improvise due to a technical delay.
Her appearance was doubly a surprise as it came amid hurricane-force rumors that Madonna will be joining Carpenter during the show, which led many to wonder if she would perform the monologue instead of Sarandon, only to find that she was being saved for an actual musical appearance later in the show.
Sitting in one of the 1950s cars that are a theme of Carpenter’s set, amid a makeshift drive-in theater lot in the middle of the field, Davis read through a monologue that preceded largely along the lines of last weekend’s script. However, the young drive-in carhop, played by her former “Girl Meets World” TV costar Corey Fogelmanis, arrived after three and a half minutes instead of seven to help her settle up her tab.
Even though the monologue hit many of the same beats as last week’s, it was paraphrased throughout. Sarandon opened with: “What a moron I was. Running around like nobody’s going to judge you, just bippity boppity boo. When of course, everybody’s judging you.” Davis’ opening: “What a moron. I was running around like that carefree, all hippity, skippity…”
The many trims that cut the speech in half included losing somewhat audience-confusing references to a fictional sister, Laurie, who Sarandon-as-Sabrina said “was always really uncomfortable whenever I was the center of attention. Sometimes she would just ignore what I was doing or other times she would shit on me. And probably she’s putting down my career right now…” Also dropped was the whole wistful/inspirational final part of the monologue, in which Sarandon had spoken of “that little voice (where) you say, fuck it, I can do this. I can do whatever I put my mind to… Why do people stop saying that to themselves when they become 12 years old?”
Later in the set, Will Ferrell was succeeded in his comedic role as an electrician by Terry Crews, playing the same part, but with different dialogue, and without the failed attempt to light a cigarette.
Of course, Madonna ultimately provided the mother of all cameos with a medley/duet of her hits… and extended astrology talk that threatened to erase the memory of any filibustering that might have gone on during Sarandon’s speech the previous week.
After rumors swirled that she would appear at Coachella weekend one, Madonna made a cameo during Sabrina Carpenter’s headlining performance on Friday night, emerging near the end of the set to perform “Vogue,” “Like a Prayer” and a new duet.
Carpenter was midway through “Juno” — typically the song on her “Short ‘n Sweet” tour where she’d “arrest” a different celebrity — to bring out Madonna. The pop queen emerged through the middle of the stage to sing “Vogue,” joining Carpenter to debut a new duet that’s rumored to be on the singer’s upcoming album “Confessions II.” Then, Madonna took the mic to give an extended address to the audience.
“So 20 years ago today I performed at Coachella,” said Madonna. “I was in the dance tent and it was the first time I performed ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor Pt. 1’ in America, and that was such a thrill for me, so you can imagine what a thrill it is to be back 20 years later in the same boots, with the same corset, the jacket I had on earlier, a Gucci jacket. So it’s like a full circle moment, you know? Very meaningful for me.”
After Madonna gave an astrology lesson (literally), the two joined forces to duet on her classic “Like a Prayer,” with backup dancers dressed in habits sauntering down from the back of the stage. “The great thing about music is that it brings people together. Am I right?” said Madonna. “It’s the one place that people have to put their differences aside. Put their shit down and everyone just have a good time togehter, right? So I am thrilled to be a part of that healing experience of bringing people together. I just want to say, four lines from my ‘Confessions 1’ record. It goes like this. Can we get together? I really, I really want to be with you. Come on check it out with me, I hope you, I hope you feel the same way too.”
As she said, Madonna’s appearance during Carpenter’s set comes 20 years after her Coachella debut in 2006, when she popped up at the Sahara Tent instead of the main stage to perform cuts from “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” She later returned to the desert for a surprise cameo during Drake’s closing set in 2015, singing “Human Nature” and “Hung Up” and, in one of the most talked-about moments that year, kissed Drake.
The timing of Madonna’s return to Coachella aligns with the announcement of her upcoming album “Confessions II” earlier this week. The project, slated for July 3 via Warner Records, marks her first full-length album in seven years and her reunion with Stuart Price, the producer of the original “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” Earlier on Friday, Madonna premiered the song “I Feel So Free” on iHeartRadio’s Pride Radio, giving a first taste of the project.
Leading up to her Coachella performance last weekend, Carpenter dropped the video for “House Tour,” the latest single off of last year’s “Man’s Best Friend.” In the clip, she has a girls’ night out with Margaret Qualley and Madelyn Cline, ransacking a stranger’s house and stealing a Grammy.
Carpenter previously performed at Coachella in 2024, foreshadowing that she’d one day take top billing during a custom outro for “Nonsense”: “Made his knees so weak he had to spread mine / He’s drinking my bathwater like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline.” This year’s headlining gig comes after a busy few years for the singer, who kicked off her “Short ‘n Sweet” tour — her first arena trek — in September 2024. She stayed on the road through the end of 2025, when she closed the tour with six nights at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena just a week before she was celebrated as Variety‘s Hitmaker of the Year.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has formally approved a rule change proposal submitted by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that aims to create a new trading mechanism for “tokenized securities.”
The proposal, outlined in document number 34-105260, is considered a critical step towards integrating traditional finance with blockchain technology.
According to the proposal, the NYSE plans to introduce a new regulation called “Rule 7.50,” allowing eligible securities to be traded in both traditional and blockchain-based “tokenized” forms. This structure will be implemented within the scope of the DTC pilot program under the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
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In the new system, tokenized securities will share the same trading code (CUSIP) and ownership structure as traditional shares. This will ensure full fungibility between the two forms. Furthermore, on the matching engine side, tokenized assets will be subject to the same priority rules as traditional shares and will not experience any disadvantage in trading order.
Market participants can choose to have transactions executed on the blockchain via a “tokenization flag” that they can use when placing orders. Technical and operational processes will be handled by authorized custodians.
NYSE’s proposal isn’t limited to the trading side alone. The exchange is also making changes to order queuing, routing, and clearing rules, aiming to seamlessly integrate tokenized securities into its existing market infrastructure.
Global financial giant UBS has published a noteworthy assessment of US monetary policy. The bank stated that it maintains its expectation that the Fed will cut interest rates later in the year.
A research note published by UBS emphasized that the Fed remains on a path of monetary policy easing under the current outlook. The report highlighted that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has recently indicated that the need for tightening is limited despite the rise in energy prices. It recalled Powell’s statement that supply shocks, particularly those like rising oil prices, are generally ignored as long as inflation expectations remain under control.
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UBS analysts stated that the Fed is looking for more evidence of a sustained decline in core inflation before returning to loose monetary policy, but they still expect a total of 50 basis points of interest rate cuts by the end of the year.
On the other hand, the report also included projections for the US bond market. UBS pointed out that current US Treasury yields are significantly higher than before the geopolitical tensions, arguing that there is therefore room for downward movement in yields. The bank stated its year-end forecast for the 2-year US Treasury yield is 3.25%, and for the 10-year Treasury yield is 3.75%.
Sabrina Carpenter brought out Madonna as a surprise guest during her Coachella weekend two headlining set Friday night, with the two pop superstars performing “Vogue,” “Like A Prayer” and a new track together.
The Queen of Pop hit the stage while the Grammy winner was singing “Juno,” at the iconic moment where Carpenter sings her lyric, “Have you ever tried this one?” The track then cut to Madonna’s iconic “Vogue” medley, and the two sang the hit together.
Madonna and Carpenter went on to seemingly perform a new song from the former artist’s upcoming ConfessionsII. After, the “Material Girl” singer thanked Carpenter for inviting her to perform alongside her.
“Sabrina, thank you so much for inviting me on your show,” Madonna said. “No thanks needed, Madonna. You can have whatever you want,” the “Espresso” singer replied. Madonna shared that two decades ago, she performed at Coachella, noting that it was a “full circle moment” being back to take the stage with Carpenter.
“I have a few things I wanna get off my chest. 20 years ago today, I performed at Coachella. I was in the dance tent, and it was the first time I performed, Confessions on the Dance Floor Part One in America,” Madonna said. “And that was such a thrill for me, so you can imagine what a thrill it is for me to be back 20 years later in the same boots, the same corset, the jacket I had on earlier, the same Gucci jacket. So, it’s like a full circle moment, very meaningful for me.”
Madonna also gave a mini lesson in astrology, pointing out that there is currently new moon in Taurus, meaning that “we need to work on our communication skills” and “avoid confrontations.”
“So in all circumstances for the rest of the month, let’s try to get along, okay?” she said. “And to that point, the great thing about music is that it brings people together, am I right? It’s the one place that people have to put their differences aside, put their shit down, and just everybody have a good time together, right?”
She continued, “So I am thrilled to be a part of that healing experience, bringing people together,” before reciting the chorus from her song “Get Together.”
To add to the dazzling surprise performance, they sang a duet of “Like A Prayer.” But not before Madonna cracked a joke about Carpenter’s height.
“The other thrilling thing I need to point out to everybody right now is this probably the first time I’ve ever performed with someone who’s shorter than me,” she said. “So, thank you for giving me that experience.”
Carpenter replied, “Amen!”
Madonna’s performance on its own made for a more musically star-studded set than Carpenter had last week, where the guest appearances were limited to actors with Susan Sarandon, Will Ferrell and Sam Elliott.
During her Friday night set, Carpenter also brought out actress Geena Davis to perform a monologue, just as her Thelma and Louise co-star Sarandon did one week prior. Terry Crews also joined in mid-set, where he poked fun at his iconic role in White Chicks and briefly sang “A Thousand Miles.”
Madonna’s appearance comes just days after the pop icon had confirmed that ConfessionsII would drop this July. It comes seven years after she’d dropped Madame X back in 2019.
Weekend two will also feature a surprise set from country superstar Kacey Musgraves at the Sahara Tent on Saturday afternoon, with Musgraves filling the slot fellow surprise act Jack White took last week.
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As someone who hadn’t been to Coachella since 2014, this year’s festival felt deeply familiar in many ways, and entirely unrecognizable in others. While 2014, of course, had its fair share of brand partners, sponsored parties and experiential marketing, they were a drop in the bucket compared to what has developed in just 12 years time.
Cut to 2026: Brand activations are popping up by the dozens, and Coachella is filled with — what have now been dubbed — “festivals within a festival,” or smaller curated experiences — often exclusive — within the larger event (think Revolve Fest or Kourtney Kardashian Barker‘s Camp Poosh). But other than the music (and the desert heat), there’s another major throughline between Coachella then and Coachella now: Heineken.
The Dutch brewing company, Coachella’s official beer sponsor for 23 consecutive years, is the festival’s longest-standing brand partner. Well before the introduction of Heineken House (the brand’s dedicated music stage and beer garden), which, funnily enough, made its Coachella debut in 2014 (I remember because I was 18 and couldn’t get in), the brewer has always held a prominent role at the festival. But how has Coachella’s most enduring partner stayed relevant in the age of activations? The short answer: community. The slightly longer answer? By innovating a piece of technology that brings people back to what OG Coachella felt like: connected.
“The Clinker,” first introduced at Weekend One of Coachella 2026, is a smart device festivalgoers place around their Heineken cans that lights up to signal music compatibility upon contact with another Clinker. By syncing with each user’s Spotify or YouTube Music data, the device allows two fans to, first, see their exact overlap in music taste, and then, share social media handles to stay connected throughout the festival and beyond.
Festivalgoers using “The Clinker” at Heineken House during Coachella Weekend One.
Heineken
“Heineken developed the Heineken House to bring fans together over music with a beer in hand,” Alison Payne, Heineken USA’s Chief Marketing Officer, exclusively tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This year, we went a step further by creating something that actively brings people together in real time. ‘The Clinker’ turns a simple ‘cheers’ into a conversation starter, leaving festival goers with a new connection or memory that will live on once the dust settles from the festival.”
Beyond the new tech, crowds were pulled to the Heineken House for its stacked lineup. Weekend One included Wale, Sean Paul, Coi Leray, Motion City Soundtrack and Less Than Jake, while Big Boi will replace Paul for Weekend Two. And since Heineken House is a closed off space with only one entry point, there’s an intentional effort to make a massive festival feel intimate.
This theme of fostering connection prevailed throughout the festival, with an overarching goal to bring Coachella back to its roots. (In fact, many fans noted that 2026 had a similar feeling to 2016.) Instead of dividing the festival, the standalone activations aimed to cultivate community. Right around the corner from Heineken House, Aperol opted for a lounge-style day club, while Soho House brought its same private, elevated feel to The Hideout. Meanwhile, just across the grass, Absolut’s Heat Haus was a star-studded affair with throwback DJ sets and Absolut Tabasco Vodka on the ready. Anyone over 21 could enter, but the space still managed to feel private and personal.
Sean Paul performs onstage at Coachella’s Heineken House on April 11, 2026.
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Heineken
At a time when — even in the most crowded of spaces — it’s easier than ever to feel isolated, brands are actively choosing to fuel connection. We’ll “Clink” to that.
Before the 2025-26 season began, the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic were thought by many to be on the same tier of the Eastern Conference. If they were to meet in the first round of the playoffs, it would probably be in the 4-5 or 3-6 series.
Instead, its 1 vs. 8. The Pistons surpassed expectations, standing at the top of the Eastern Conference all season. The Magic were a disappointment, needing the final SoFi Play-In Tournament game to claim the 8 seed. But they split their four head-to-head matchups, with each team winning once on the other’s floor.
Neither franchise has won a playoff series in more than 15 years, and one of those droughts is about to end. The Pistons face the pressure of being the top seed, while the Magic face the possibility of major offseason changes should their Play-In victory over the Charlotte Hornets on Friday prove to be fluky.
Series schedule
Here’s how to watch the Pistons vs. Magic series:
All times Eastern Standard Time
Game 1: Orlando at Detroit | Sunday April 19 (6:30 ET, NBC/Peacock)
Game 2: Orlando at Detroit | Wednesday April 22 (7 ET, ESPN)
Game 3: Detroit at Orlando | Saturday April 25 (1 ET, NBC/Peacock)
Ball pressure and ball security. The Magic were the league’s third-most improved offensive team, but they took a big step backward defensively after ranking in the top three on that end of the floor in each of the last two seasons. Much of that regression was about turnovers: They went from second in opponent turnover rate (16.8 per 100 possessions) last season to 14th (14.7) this year; it was the league’s biggest drop.
With their season on the line on Friday, the Magic looked like their old selves, shutting down the Hornets’ fifth-ranked offense. It started with relentless ball pressure, and led to 20 Charlotte turnovers.
The Pistons’ ball security isn’t great. They ranked 23rd in turnover rate (15.1 per 100) in the regular season and had a much worse rate (16.9 per 100) in last year’s first-round loss to the Knicks. So if the Magic’s ball pressure can carry over from the Play-In to the playoffs, they can keep the Pistons from getting clean looks at the basket and enhance their own efficiency with transition opportunities.
Keep your eyes on
Rebounding. These are two of the top nine rebounding teams in the league, with the Pistons ranking third in offensive rebounding percentage and the Magic fifth in defensive rebounding percentage.
Field goal percentage is always lower in the playoffs than it is in the regular season, and with more missed shots, there are more rebounds to be had. So each team’s ability to secure the glass is more important. The Pistons won the rebounding battle in the regular season series, retaining 36.5% of available offensive boards (the second-best mark among all Orlando opponents) over the four games. Ausar Thompson (13) and Jalen Duren (12) accounted for half of Detroit’s 50 offensive boards against the Magic.
1 more thing to watch for each team
For Detroit: The Pistons set 2,260 ball-screens for Cade Cunningham this season, the third-highest total among all ball-handlers and a rate of more than 50 per 100 possessions. The Magic, meanwhile, have generally been a drop-coverage defense, encouraging ball-handlers to shoot off the dribble.
While Cunningham has seen steady improvement with his pull-up game over his five seasons, his effective field goal percentage of 49.3% on pullup jumpers this season ( 27th among the 88 players who attempted at least 200) is a number that favors the defense. Still, we could see Orlando mix up its coverages and force other guys to make plays and make shots.
Duren has been a much-improved roll man, both in regard to passing and creating his own shot. The Pistons will also let Tobias Harris go to work in the post, but Thompson (who made 16 total shots from outside the paint this season) will be ignored on the perimeter, compromising the spacing. This team can win ugly, but the offense will be under the spotlight in this series and going forward.
For Orlando: Paolo Banchero has yet to live up to the expectations that have come with being a former No. 1 pick, and he’s yet to make it really work with teammate Franz Wagner. The Magic’s Banchero-led offense has struggled (104.3 points scored per 100 possessions) in the first round of the playoffs over the last two years.
A series against the league’s second-ranked defense won’t be any easier. But it’s another opportunity for Banchero to prove that he’s an offensive star who can make plays for himself and his teammates. Turnovers were an issue, but he averaged 26.3 points in his three games vs. Detroit this season, with his true shooting percentage (64.8%) being his fifth best mark vs. any opponent.
1 key number to know
13.9 – The Pistons outscored their opponents by 13.9 points per game in the restricted area, the third biggest differential for any team in the last 15 seasons. They’re not going to beat teams from the perimeter (they ranked 29th in 3-point rate), but they can be dominant inside.
On offense, the Pistons led the league in the percentage of their shots (36%) that came in the restricted area. On defense, they ranked second in opponent field goal percentage in the restricted area (62.4%), with opponents having shot just 43.8% at the rim when Isaiah Stewart was there. That was the best rim-protection mark for a player who defended at least 200 shots at the rim in the 12 seasons for which we have tracking data.
The Magic ranked seventh in restricted-area differential (+3.0 points per game), even though they ranked 28th in field goal percentage (63.9%) at the basket. They actually outscored the Pistons by four points in the restricted area over the two early-season meetings in Detroit, but the Pistons were plus-30 there over the two late-season meetings in Orlando, with the difference in the Magic’s April 6 win coming at the free-throw line.
The pick
Pistons in 5. The Magic survived the Play-In and played one of their best games of the season on Friday, but have never consistently looked the part of a team that can win a playoff series, especially against an opponent as tough as the Pistons. Detroit should dominate inside and Orlando, the only playoff team that ranked in the bottom seven in both 3-point percentage and 3-point rate, doesn’t have the shooting to win from the perimeter.
The Magic could keep a game or two competitive, but the Pistons shouldn’t have much trouble advancing to the Eastern Conference semifinals for the first time since 2008.
Paolo Banchero powers the Magic with a game-high 25 points in the victory over Charlotte.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Paolo Banchero scored 25 points and the Orlando Magic rolled to a 35-point first-half lead, taking full control on the way to a 121-90 rout of Charlotte Hornets in a SoFi NBA Play-In Tournament elimination game on Friday night.
The Magic earned the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Their reward is a matchup with top-seeded Detroit, a best-of-seven that begins Sunday on the Pistons’ home floor.
The Magic were physical from the outset, and the Hornets were never in the game. Franz Wagner had 18 points for the Magic, along with seven rebounds and six assists.
Wendell Carter Jr. finished with 16 points on 6-for-7 shooting, while Desmond Bane scored 13 and Jalen Suggs added 12 for the Magic.
Orlando led by 31 at halftime, the biggest midpoint lead in the Play-In Tournament’s seven-year history. It has been utilized in this format — four teams qualifying from each conference, playing to decide the final two playoff spots on each half of the bracket — since 2021.
LaMelo Ball — who the NBA said should have been ejected from Tuesday’s season-extending win over Miami for an uncalled flagrant foul against Bam Adebayo — led the Hornets with 23 points, 21 of them coming in the third quarter.
But the game was long decided at that point. Orlando raced out to a 27-10 lead, stretched it to 68-33 late in the first half, and the Hornets never even got within 20 points the rest of the way.
Miles Bridges, who has played more games than any other active player without a playoff appearance, scored 15 for the Hornets. Brandon Miller scored 14 and Kon Knueppel added 11.
The Hornets, who have now missed the playoffs in 10 straight seasons, were outrebounded 49-34 and shot only 34%. Orlando shot 50%.
The Magic were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in each of the last two postseasons and have not won a playoff round since 2010. But they went 2-2 against the Pistons this season.
The Hornets, who beat the Magic in their last three regular-season games, have not been in the playoffs since 2016. It’s the longest active drought in the NBA.
Bitcoin investors are suddenly confronting an uncomfortable math problem inside the $91.7 billion U.S. spot bitcoin ETF market.
“Coinbase Custody holds 84% of all US spot Bitcoin ETF assets,” Marc Baumann, founder of research firm fiftyonexyz, posted on X on April 14. “That’s $77 billion with a single custodian. For an industry built on decentralization, the most important product category has a single point of failure. Regulators will notice.”
The warning is landing as bitcoin trades near $77,000, having clawed back from a 40% drawdown since its late-2025 peak around $126,000. It also lands three weeks after the April 2 conditional approval of a national trust charter for Coinbase by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “OCC grants Coinbase conditional approval for a National Trust Bank Charter,” Swiss law firm Goldblum & Partners posted on X on April 13, noting that “11 crypto firms now in the federal banking pipeline” and that a new rule, 12 CFR 5.20, “explicitly permits non-fiduciary crypto custody for national trust banks.” That regulatory blessing, in a twist, deepens the concentration analysts are now calling out.
The figure itself has become the new rallying cry of bitcoin’s structural skeptics. CryptoSlate first framed the dollar number on April 12 as “over 80% of Bitcoin ETF assets hit Coinbase custody choke point with $74B at risk.” Within 48 hours, the phrasing was circulating through crypto-media accounts and analyst threads.
“Over 80% of Bitcoin ETF assets now sit inside Coinbase custody. That’s roughly $74B concentrated in one infrastructure layer,” wrote crypto-media account W3BCMedia on April 13. Institutional adoption was growing, the account added, “but so is systemic custody risk.”
What the data shows
The $91.7 billion pile of U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund assets, a figure Baumann compiled from issuer prospectus filings, spans BlackRock’s IBIT, ARK 21Shares’ ARKB and Morgan Stanley’s newly launched MSBT, among others. A common thread runs through the bulk of them: Coinbase Prime is the custodian. Fidelity’s FBTC is the notable exception, self-custodying through in-house Fidelity Digital Assets.
New inflows are not diversifying that base. Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham confirmed on X on April 15 that “Morgan Stanley is buying bitcoin” via MSBT, noting the fund “has bought $83.6M of BTC” and “currently holds $64.4M in its on-chain addresses.” Those coins, too, route through Coinbase Prime.
For retail investors holding ETF shares, the arrangement has been a non-issue since spot approval in January 2024. For the handful of X accounts now amplifying the warning, it reads differently.
“Not Your Keys Not Your Coins,” wrote a pseudonymous account on April 14, citing the list of exchanges that have failed since 2014. “Makes you question Saylor or IBIT risk. Really Coinbase custody is a major key man risk.”
Why Wall Street is pushing in anyway
The paradox is that institutional appetite is accelerating, not slowing, as the concentration grows.
Fordefi, a crypto wallet infrastructure firm, tallied the last 90 days on X: Mastercard acquiring stablecoin rails provider BVNK for $1.8 billion; Citi rolling out institutional bitcoin custody; Morgan Stanley saying it will “operate as a crypto bank”; Crypto.com joining BitGo, Circle, Ripple and Paxos with OCC approval. “FDIC opened a formal crypto custody study,” the post added.
The bitcoin ETF market has “officially entered Phase Two,” Joe Consorti, a macro and bitcoin analyst, said in an April 15 video that has drawn more than 14,000 views. Phase One, Consorti argued, was basic spot access. Phase Two, he said, is about packaging bitcoin into volatility-dampened, yield-generating products for conservative investors, pointing to Goldman Sachs’s premium-income ETF filing, Morgan Stanley’s MSBT and Schwab’s advisor-channel products.
Consorti’s math: a 3% allocation from U.S. wealth advisors alone could push bitcoin to $210,000. The $144 trillion wealth-advisory market is the pool the ETF wrapper now unlocks.
The bull case leans on the same custody data that worries the skeptics. On Simply Bitcoin’s April 15 video,, the host called MicroStrategy and its ETF-wrapped peers “a synthetic miner,” buying more bitcoin in one session than the network mints in a week.
Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan goes even bigger. His long-term $1 million target rests on a “sustained steady boom” of institutional flows, not the violent boom-bust cycles of earlier bitcoin eras. Every dollar landing in Coinbase Prime, on that read, is bullish collateral.
The bear case: regulators haven’t blinked yet
The bull narrative has only been tested in two calm years. One custody incident, one freeze order or one operational failure at a venue holding $77 billion would test it all at once.
Baumann’s phrase, “regulators will notice,” is the line critics keep returning to. The OCC’s April 2 trust-charter pulls Coinbase inside the federal banking perimeter. That cuts two ways: more oversight, and more exposure to the kind of supervisory actions banks periodically face. So far, neither Coinbase nor the OCC has publicly flagged any worry about the ETF concentration.
An April 13 post from fiduciary-focused account prudentmachines pushed a different fault line. “Coinbase got conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank charter, enabling them to custody federally regulated digital assets. Coinbase custodies most U.S. Bitcoin ETF assets,” the account wrote. “The question is whether that custodial function triggers fiduciary status under ERISA.”
If it does, retirement-plan sponsors eyeing spot bitcoin exposure through 401(k) menus inherit a set of duties they have not yet been asked to perform. The Department of Labor’s March 30 proposed “safe harbor” rule for alternative assets in 401(k) plans is already sharpening the question.
Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, has gone further. On an April 3 Bankless interview, Carter argued the near-term quantum-computing risk to bitcoin sits inside “institutional custody and wallet infrastructure,” naming Coinbase Custody and Fidelity. He calls what is piling up on those platforms “cryptographic migration debt.”
Michael Saylor has pushed a different worry. His “paper bitcoin” warnings, broken down on Germany’s Blocktrainer channel on April 13, argue that institutional claims on coins at centralized custodians inflate what looks like real circulating supply. Host Roman Reher summarized the point bluntly: holding coins at a major custodian “doesn’t guarantee they aren’t being used as collateral.”
Coinbase’s own ETF prospectus filings say the opposite. Spot ETF assets, per the documents, are held in segregated cold storage, not lent out or rehypothecated. The SEC approved the spot bitcoin ETFs on that premise. The open question is whether it holds under stress.
What to watch
The cleanest exit is diversification. A second custodian named in any issuer’s next filing would break the math instantly. So would OCC or Securities and Exchange Commission guidance on custody concentration, or Coinbase laying out contingency arrangements for its biggest clients.
None of it has happened yet.
Bitcoin trades near $77,000. Roughly $77 billion of its U.S. institutional footprint sits in one place. “Regulators will notice,” Baumann wrote on April 14. For now, nobody at the OCC or the SEC has said otherwise.
Part 1 of this series explained what quantum computers actually are. Not just faster versions of regular computers, but a fundamentally different kind of machine that exploits the weird rules of physics that only apply at the scale of atoms and particles.
But knowing how a quantum computer works does not tell you how it can be used to steal bitcoin by a bad actor. That requires understanding what it is actually attacking, how bitcoin’s security is built, and exactly where the weakness sits.
This piece starts with bitcoin’s encryption and works through to the nine-minute window it takes to break it, as identified by Google’s recent quantum computing paper.
The one-way map
Bitcoin uses a system called elliptic curve cryptography to prove who owns what. Every wallet has two keys. A private key, which is a secret number, 256 digits long in binary, roughly as long as this sentence. A public key is derived from the private key by performing a mathematical operation on the specific curve called “secp256k1.”
Think of it as a one-way map. Start at a known location on the curve that everyone agrees on, called the generator point G (as shown in the chart below). Take a private number of steps in a pattern defined by the curve’s math. The number of steps is your private key. Where you end up on the curve is your public key (point K in the chart). Anyone can verify that you ended up at that specific location. Nobody can figure out how many steps you took to get there.
Technically, this is written as K = k × G, where k is your private key and K is your public key. The “multiplication” is not regular multiplication but a geometric operation where you repeatedly add a point to itself along the curve. The result lands on a seemingly random spot that only your specific number k would produce.
The crucial property is that going forward is easy and going backward is, for classical computers, effectively impossible. If you know k and G, calculating K takes milliseconds. If you know K and G and want to figure out k, you are solving what mathematicians call the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem.
It is estimated that the best-known classical algorithms for a 256-bit curve would take longer than the age of the universe.
This one-way trapdoor is the entire security model. Your private key proves you own your coins. Your public key is safe to share because no classical computer can reverse the math. When you send bitcoin, your wallet uses the private key to create a digital signature, a mathematical proof that you know the secret number without revealing it.
Shor’s algorithm opens the door both ways
In 1994, a mathematician named Peter Shor discovered a quantum algorithm that breaks the trapdoor.
Shor’s algorithm solves the discrete logarithm problem efficiently. The same math that would take a classical computer longer than the universe has existed, Shor’s algorithm handles in what mathematicians call polynomial time, meaning the difficulty grows slowly as numbers get bigger rather than explosively.
The intuition for how it works comes back to the three quantum properties from Part 1 of this series.
The algorithm needs to find your private key k, given your public key K and the generator point G. It converts this into a problem of finding the period of a function. Think of a function that takes a number as input and returns a point on the elliptic curve.
As you feed it sequential numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, the outputs eventually repeat in a cycle. The length of that cycle is called the period, and once you know how often the function repeats, the math of the discrete logarithm problem unravels in a single step. The private key falls out almost immediately.
Finding this period of a function is exactly what quantum computers are built for. The algorithm puts its input register into a superposition (or, in quantum mechanics, a particle exists in multiple locations simultaneously), representing all possible values simultaneously. It applies the function to all of them at once.
Then it applies a quantum operation called the Fourier transform, which causes the number of wrong answers to cancel out while the correct answers are reinforced.
When you measure the result, the period appears. From this period, ordinary math recovers k. That is your private key, and therefore your coins.
The attack uses all three quantum tricks from the first piece. Superposition evaluates the function on every possible input at once. Entanglement links the input and output so the results stay correlated. ‘Interference’ filters the noise until only the answer remains.
Why bitcoin still works today
Shor’s algorithm has been known for more than 30 years. The reason bitcoin still exists is that running it requires a quantum computer with a large enough number of stable qubits to maintain coherence through the entire calculation.
Building that machine has been beyond reach, but the question has always been how large is “large enough.”
Previous estimates said millions of physical qubits. Google’s paper, in early April by its Quantum AI division with contributions from Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh, reduced that to fewer than 500,000.
Or a roughly 20-fold reduction from prior estimates.
The team designed two quantum circuits that implement Shor’s algorithm against bitcoin’s specific elliptic curve. One uses approximately 1,200 logical qubits and 90 million Toffoli gates. The other uses approximately 1,450 logical qubits and 70 million Toffoli gates.
A Toffoli gate is a type of gate that acts on three qubits: two control qubits, which affect the state of a third, target qubit. Imagine this as three light switches (qubits) and a special lightbulb (the target) that only turns on if two specific switches are flipped on at the same time.
Because qubits lose their quantum state constantly, as Part 1 explained, you need hundreds of redundant qubits checking each other’s work to maintain a single reliable logical qubit. Most of a quantum computer exists just to catch the machine’s own mistakes before they ruin the calculation. The roughly 400-to-1 ratio between physical and logical qubits reflects how much of the machine exists as self-babysitting infrastructure.
The nine-minute window
Google’s paper did not just reduce qubit counts. It introduced a practical attack scenario that changes how to think about the threat.
The parts of Shor’s algorithm that depend only on the elliptic curve’s fixed parameters, which are publicly known and identical for every bitcoin wallet, can be precomputed. The quantum computer sits in a primed state, already halfway through the calculation, waiting.
The moment a target public key appears, whether broadcast in a transaction to the network’s mempool or already exposed on the blockchain from a previous transaction, the machine only needs to finish the second half.
Google estimates that the second half takes about nine minutes.
Bitcoin’s average block confirmation time is 10 minutes. That means if a user broadcasts a transaction and their public key is visible in the mempool, a quantum attacker has roughly nine minutes to derive a private key and submit a competing transaction that redirects funds.
The math gives the attacker a roughly 41% chance of finishing before your original transaction confirms.
That is the mempool attack. It is alarming but it requires a quantum computer that does not exist yet.
The bigger concern, however, is the 6.9 million bitcoin (roughly one-third of total supply) sitting in wallets where the public key has already been permanently exposed on the blockchain. Those coins are vulnerable to an “at-rest” attack that requires no race against the clock. The attacker can take as long as needed.
A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can turn a bitcoin public key into the private key that controls the coins. For coins transacted since Taproot (a privacy upgrade on Bitcoin that went live in November 2021), the public key is already visible. For coins in older addresses, the public key is hidden until you spend, at which point you have roughly nine minutes before the attacker catches up.
What this means in practice, which 6.9 million bitcoin are already exposed, what Taproot changed, and how fast the hardware is closing the gap, is the subject of the next and final piece in this series.
