Author: rb809rb

A second corporate accumulator of cryptocurrency is starting to look a lot like the first.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), the treasury firm chaired by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, bought 101,901 ether ($ETH) worth roughly $234 million last week. That’s close to the regular weekly purchases from Strategy (MSTR), the Michael Saylor-led bitcoin digital treasury company, as well-followed crypto trader Luke Martin flagged on X.

Strategy’s normal weekly buys are around $200 million to $300 million, once large purchases fueled by at-the-market sales of its perpetual preferred stock STRC are stripped out. The STRC spikes — the massive bursts that show up in mid-January, late February, late March and, most recently, April 21 at $2.54 billion — are the outliers, not the baseline.

Bitmine’s purchase was its largest weekly accumulation of 2026, capping a four-month streak of escalating buys that started at roughly $76 million per week in early January. It now holds more than 5 million tokens, or about 4.21% of the second-largest cryptocurrency’s circulating supply.

Such a structural development matters because BitMine is now the only major corporate crypto buyer keeping pace alongside Strategy.

Most digital asset treasury companies paused or slowed accumulation through the February price drop that took bitcoin to the mid-$60,000s and ether below $1,900. Strategy itself ended a 13-week bitcoin buying streak in late March before restarting in April.

Lee’s framing for the buying pace is that $ETH is in the late stages of a “mini-crypto winter” and that a bottom is forming in equity markets. Bitmine pivoted to its current strategy in June 2025 and reached the 5 million $ETH milestone in roughly 10 months.

The firm has staked about 73% of those tokens, generating roughly $264 million in annualized revenue from yield. Total crypto and cash holdings sat at $13.3 billion as of early April.

The two firms share a playbook of capital markets activity — Strategy through preferred stock and convertible debt, Bitmine through equity issuance — to purchase crypto assets.

Under pressure

BitMine’s strategy was put under pressure in February and early March, when it was sitting on nearly $8 billion in unrealized losses against $16 billion in total purchases.

The firm kept buying. Two months later, ether is up 22% from its February lows, and Bitmine’s accumulation pace has not just held, it’s accelerated.

Strategy’s April 21 purchase of $2.54 billion remains the largest single corporate crypto buy of the year. But Bitmine’s $234 million last week is the first time the structural baselines have come within striking distance of each other.

If the pattern holds for another month, ether will have something it has never had before: a Strategy-equivalent corporate buyer absorbing supply each week regardless of price.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has released a significant update regarding margin trading, announcing that it will be removing certain trading pairs from its platform. According to the announcement, as of May 1, 2026, at 09:00, certain pairs will be delisted from both cross and isolated margin trading.

The trading pairs to be delisted include TRX/$ETH, LINK/$ETH, WLD/$BTC, HBAR/$BTC, and DOT/$BTC. These pairs will be removed from trading in both cross-margin and isolated margin categories. The assets in question include leading crypto projects such as TRON, Chainlink, Worldcoin, Hedera, and Polkadot.

Binance emphasized that users should exercise caution during this process. Borrowing operations in isolated margin accounts will be suspended as of April 29, 2026. Upon reaching the delist date, users’ open positions will be automatically closed, all pending orders will be canceled, and automatic settlement will be performed by the system.

It was also stated that users would not be able to update their positions for approximately three hours during the delisting process. Therefore, investors were advised to close their positions in advance or transfer their assets from margin accounts to spot accounts to prevent potential losses. Binance also explicitly stated that it would not be responsible for any potential losses that may occur during this process.

On the other hand, it was announced that trading of the relevant assets will continue on Binance in different trading pairs.

*This is not investment advice.

Arthur Hayes, a leading figure in the cryptocurrency market, has made a remarkable bullish prediction for Bitcoin. Speaking at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference, Hayes argued that based on current market dynamics, the price of Bitcoin could rise to $125,000.

According to Hayes, the recent pullback in Bitcoin from its peak is due to job losses among knowledge workers and the resulting credit crunch caused by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence technologies.

However, Hayes noted that the market focus shifted with the start of US-Iran tensions in February, stating that investors are now pricing in the risk of “wartime inflation” instead of “AI-induced recession.” He said this shift paved the way for Bitcoin to regain strength against the Nasdaq Composite, which is largely represented by technology stocks.

Hayes also touched upon the policies of the US Federal Reserve, downplaying concerns about hawkish monetary policy and stating that the impact of tightening on market liquidity would be limited.

In contrast, he argued that the eSLR regulations, which came into effect in April and allow banks to extend more credit, would create approximately $1.3 trillion in new lending capacity. Hayes maintained that this increase in liquidity and the defense spending triggered by the war economy would offset the economic slowdown caused by artificial intelligence.

Hayes, arguing that the market has passed its lows, stated that current conditions create a strong bullish environment for Bitcoin, emphasizing that investors should be prepared for higher price levels in the coming period.

*This is not investment advice.

Ondo Finance is bringing tokenized equities closer to their traditional counterparts, offering investors a way to participate in corporate governance.

The feature, built with Broadridge Financial Solutions (BR), allows holders of more than 250 tokenized securities on Ondo’s platform to review company filings and submit voting preferences through Broadridge’s ProxyVote system.

Investors can log in with crypto wallets, then access documents and governance tools typically reserved for brokerage accounts.

The move comes as tokenized equities have emerged as one of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto, bringing stocks and ETFs on blockchain rails. The category now holds over $1.1 billion in value locked, tripling in size over the past year, RWA.xyz data shows. Ondo is the largest issuer in the sector, reporting more than $700 million in stock and ETF tokens on its Global Markets platform, offered to non-U.S. investors.

Adding proxy voting to equity tokens matters because these offerings have often lacked basic governance rights. While Ondo’s tokens remain separate from the underlying shares and do not grant direct shareholder rights, the new system lets investors express preferences that Ondo can apply when voting the shares it holds.

“It really hits at the heart of Ondo’s vision to make traditional financial assets more accessible,” Matthieu de Vergnes, Ondo’s global head of institutional, said in an interview with CoinDesk. “You get all the benefits of being onchain – freely transferable, compatible with DeFi – and on top of that, you get the governance that you have from the the underlying.”

Broadridge, which processes large volumes of proxy votes in traditional markets, is extending its infrastructure to blockchain systems with this move. The firm said the goal is to support both digital and conventional assets within the same workflows.

Giving investors the same level of auditability, transparency and compliance will “really go a long way in making the tokenized world more scalable, giving that level of trust to end investors,” said Danielle Gurrieri, senior vice president and head of product management at Broadridge.

The Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) monetary policy decision on Tuesday boosted expectations of a hike in borrowing costs by the end of the second quarter. The yen is loving it, while bitcoin remains under pressure.

The central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 0.75% as widely expected. The decision, however, wasn’t unanimous, as three board members wanted to hike rates today itself.

The 6–3 vote split is the largest since Kazuo Ueda became governor of the central bank, indicating that more policymakers are now pushing to raise borrowing costs.

Markets price June rate hike

The central bank also raised its forecast for core inflation to 2.8% for this fiscal year, while revising economic growth projections lower to 0.5% from 1%. The rationale behind the BoJ’s hawkish tilt is largely tied to war-related disruptions in energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which have pushed up global energy prices and fed into inflationary pressures across energy-import-dependent economies like Japan.

Traders immediately priced in a 74% chance of a rate hike on June 16. That aligns with the consensus among Bank of Japan watchers, who had widely expected a June hike ahead of the decision, according to Bloomberg News.

Yen jumps: Another carry unwind shock ahead?

The Japanese yen rose, pushing the dollar-yen (USD/JPY) pair down nearly 0.5% to 158.95 (For major currencies, that’s a notable move). Rate hikes, or expectations of them, typically support a country’s currency, in this case, the yen.

The bitcoin-yen pair (BTC/JPY) listed on bitFlyer fell by 0.6% to 12.28 million yen, consistent with the weakness in the dollar-denominated prices, according to data source TradingView.

Trends in the Japanese yen are closely watched, given its long-standing role as a funding currency.

Sustained yen strength is often associated with risk aversion. This is because the Bank of Japan’s prolonged period of ultra-low interest rates over the past decade, including the post-COVID years, encouraged traders to borrow in yen and invest in higher-yielding assets abroad.

As a result, yen strength is often seen as triggering the unwinding of these so-called carry trades. The unwinding of yen-funded positions was widely cited as weighing on global risk assets in August 2024, when bitcoin fell from $65,000 to $50,000 over the course of a week.

It is therefore possible that growing expectations of a potential rate hike in June could renew concerns about another episode of yen carry trade unwind-driven global risk aversion.

That said, the latest available data on market flows from February suggests otherwise. Japan continued increasing its holdings of U.S. Treasury notes, indicating that yen-funded carry trades remain active.

“Japan, the largest foreign holder, raised its stockpile by +$14 billion, to $1.24 trillion, the highest since February 2022. This marks Japan’s 13th monthly purchase of the last 14 months, as Japanese institutions continue chasing higher yields overseas,” the founders of newsletter service LondonCryptoClub said.

“As we have said, there is no “JPY carry unwind” trade. Those who are talking about that don’t understand how Japanese investors operate and you should ignore them,” they added.