Category: Business

After peaking above $69,000 on Wednesday and suggesting a potential rebound for the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin dropped more than 3% on Friday to nearly $65,000 as stocks dipped and gold enjoyed a 1.4% bump.

The S&P 500 has fallen 0.7% and the Nasdaq has slipped 1.15% since the New York opening bell on Friday.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was changing hands for $65,222 and has lost 3.5% compared to the same time last week, according to crypto price aggregator CoinGecko.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has been trading for nearly half its all-time high price of $126,080 for the better part of the past week.

Bitcoin had a bumpy week, starting with a sell-off Monday. There was more turbulence mid-week as President Donald Trump’s 10% global tariff went into effect, but a brief window of relief as Nvidia’s earnings steadied tech stocks and crypto markets alike.

“After reaching the $70K psychological level, upside momentum faded,” analysts at Tokyo-based crypto exchange Bitbank wrote in a note shared with Decrypt. “Since Thursday, in the absence of fresh catalysts, BTC has traded in a narrow range in the mid-to-high $60K area.”

Other major cryptocurrencies have fallen in line with Bitcoin, with Ethereum dropping more than 5% on the day to $1,918, while XRP is down about 4% to $1.35 and Solana has dipped over 5% to $81.50.

The price of gold, however, has ticked up to $5,268 as investors seek safe haven assets. Meanwhile, crypto stocks have taken a beating, with some falling much harder than indices indicate.

CoreWeave (CRWV), a Bitcoin mining firm turned AI-native cloud computing provider, had dropped 21% to $76.92 at the time of writing.

On Friday morning, analysts at Macquarie dropped their price target for the firm. They explained in a note shared with Decrypt that the company missed on its earnings and needs substantial investment before it can bring additional compute resources online.

“Execution at this scale could be choppy,” they added, dropping their price target for the stock from $115 to $90.

Ethereum treasury giant BitMine Immersion Technologies has seen its shares drop 7.3% in the past day, falling to $18.95. The company holds 4.42 million ETH that’s worth approximately $8.2 billion at the time of writing. And its Ethereum treasury competitor, Sharplink, has seen its shares drop 6.7% to $6.73. SBET currently holds over 863,000 ETH, which is worth approximately $1.6 billion at current prices.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s payments processor, Block Inc., has seen its shares buck the crypto stock trend. Block, which trades under XYZ, has gained nearly 15% since the opening bell after the company announced that it has cut 40% of its staff in a pivot to rely more on AI.

Magic Eden co-founder and CEO Jack Lu disclosed on Friday that the NFT marketplace and token trading platform is ending support for Ethereum-compatible and Bitcoin-based assets.

In less than two weeks, Magic Eden users will no longer be able to trade assets associated with the networks on its platform, Lu said on X. That includes assets minted on Ethereum scaling networks like Polygon and Base, as well as Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes meme coins.

Magic Eden’s self-custodial wallet will see similar changes, Lu said, with plans to no longer support the assets at the beginning of April. He said the marketplace will continue to support those within Solana’s ecosystem, where the NFT marketplace debuted in 2021.

The move, which was first reported by Blockspace Media, marks a significant shift in Magic Eden’s approach to user adoption. The company had previously become the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume by pioneering a multi-chain approach, while cornering the once-hot market for Bitcoin-based Ordinals years ago.

Magic Eden signaled last year that it was building beyond the ever-cooling market for digital collectibles by acquiring Slingshot Finance, a mobile-first crypto trading application. At the time, efforts to break into the market for meme coin trading were poised across multiple chains.

In January, Lu unveiled Dicey, saying that the crypto casino and sportsbook would position the company to capitalize on a “speculation supercycle.” On Friday, Lu said that the company is continuing to orient itself around  “the massive opportunity in iGaming.”

As part of the shift, Lu said that the company will no longer conduct NFT buybacks. Meanwhile, the firm will seek to refine how its ME token is used across products, Lu said.

Magic Eden’s ME token, which can be used to earn rewards and participate in the project’s governance, changed hands around 12 cents on Friday, according to CoinGecko. The token’s value has plummeted 97% from a peak of $5.63 after its debut in December 2024.

Since its debut, Magic Eden has raised $140 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase. That includes a $130 million Series B funding round in 2022, which valued the firm at a whopping $1.6 billion, and was co-led by venture capital firms Greylock and Electric Capital.

Magic Eden was among earliest adopters of Ordinals and Runes, racing to support the assets that resemble NFTs and meme coins on Bitcoin before most top-tier exchanges. The company continued to solidify its lead with Ordinals and Runes, even as those markets cooled.

Last month, Magic Eden generated $576 million in trading volume across digital collectibles, according to a Dune dashboard. Although that activity was mostly centered around NFTs on Solana, $121,000 in trading volume came from Bitcoin-based assets over the period.

It appears that some projects are ready to take up the mantle as far as Bitcoin-based assets go. Taproots Wizards co-founder Udi Wertheimer said on X earlier this month that a dedicated marketplace for the Ordinals-focused project is “coming soon.”

The first rule of self-custodying crypto is that you do not tell anyone your seed phrase—a set of 12 or 24 words that unlocks the private key to the wallet, therefore enabling control of the digital assets inside.

South Korea’s National Tax Service (NTS) broke that rule in a very public fashion this week, publishing a photo of hand-written seed phrases in a press release and enabling an unidentified actor to make off with tokens valued at $4.8 million at face value, according to a local news report from Maeli Business Newspaper. But the highly illiquid tokens have since been returned.

The incident occurred after the NTS completed a search and seizure of high-value tax delinquents and subsequently photographed some of its haul to share in a press release. In that release, one individual’s lot, labeled as “Case 3,” included multiple Ledger hardware devices and their respective seed phrases, according to the report. 

“This is like advertising to open your wallet and take your money,” Professor Cho Jae-woo of Hansung University told the publication.

Upon publication of the release, an individual did just that, pulling contents from at least three wallets into an Ethereum address ending in “86c12” before transferring them again. 

On-chain data shows that three distinct addresses holding a total of 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG)—valued at $4.8 million based on the token’s current price—were funded with a negligible amount of Ethereum to cover transaction fees before the user transferred their respective PRTG tokens to “86c12.”

The three addresses, which have not made any transactions since January 2023, held 40% of the total supply of the PRTG token—a defunct Ethereum-based token that boasts only 1,500 holders and 1,600 transfers all-time. 

While initial reports noted the token’s $4.8 million face value, if the thief tried to sell these tokens, they would have not been able to recoup anywhere near that amount given very limited liquidity. The token lists no trading pairs on decentralized exchanges, and is only listed on one centralized exchange—MEXC—where it registered 24-hour volumes of only $332. 

According to CoinGecko, the exchange’s liquidity for the PRTG-USDT trading pair is so small that only $59 in volume would send the price down 2%. For comparison, to move Bitcoin down 2% down on MEXC, a trader would need to sell around $2.6 million worth of the top crypto coin.

Perhaps that understanding is why on Friday morning, about 20 hours after initially moving the PRTG tokens, an address tied to the original “86c12” address transferred all the tokens back to their original wallets. 

The hiccup is just the latest in a string of apparent crypto blunders for officials in South Korea. Earlier this week, it was discovered that $1.4 million in BTC went missing four years ago thanks to police not adhering to proper crypto custody guidelines. 

Plus, South Korean regulators have come under fire after not finding an internal flaw in crypto exchange Bithumb’s system, which led to the firm erroneously distributing $43 billion worth of Bitcoin to users earlier this month rather than sending them small amounts of South Korean won.

Trump Media and Technology Group (DJT) is considering spinning off Truth Social—its free speech-focused social media platform championed by President Donald Trump—into its own public entity, the firm announced on Friday. 

The move would see Truth Social and other Trump Media businesses become SpinCo, which would then merge with Texas Ventures III. However, some assets and businesses would remain with the Trump Media, though the firm did not indicate which.

Shares of the new entity would be provided to DJT shareholders prior to the firm’s announced merger with TAE Technologies, a power fusion firm that is still in a pending merger with the Trump Media.

“The contemplated transaction is intended to create shareholder value through the creation of pure play companies, each with distinct strategies,” the firm’s announcement reads. 

The news did not immediately register any positive impacts for DJT shareholders though. Shares in the firm are down around 2.10% today as broader markets decline. It has now fallen around 40% in the last six months, recently changing hands around $10.73. 

While the comment above might suggest that Trump Media’s crypto initiatives would remain alongside Truth Social, details about its crypto-related plans were not immediately clear. A representative for the firm did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment. 

Last year the firm sought to “protect itself from discrimination from financial institutions” by adding $2 billion in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related securities to its balance sheet. 

It also filed for a Bitcoin ETF last June and later a crypto blue chip ETF, which includes other tokens like Ethereum, Solana (SOL) and Ripple-linked XRP. 

The firm signaled its intent to bolster its crypto ETF offerings earlier this year, filing for a joint Truth Social-branded Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF, as well as one centered on the Crypto.com-linked token, CRO.

It is also working with Crypto.com on a digital token that would be airdropped to Trump Media shareholders as it seeks to adopt crypto rails across its business. The deadline for broker participants to provide information on shareholders passed earlier this month, though the token has not yet been distributed.