Category: Business

Market dynamics continue to paint a bullish picture for bitcoin even as Iran-related developments and DeFi hacks dominate headlines.

U.S.-listed spot ETFs pulled in $663 million on Friday, the most since Jan. 15. Total inflows reached $996 million last week, up from $786 million the week prior, according to data source SoSoValue. This points to strong institutional interest in the largest cryptocurrency.

For a meaningful price rally to emerge, it’s a trend that needs to be sustained.

“ETF flow regimes provide a secondary read: Sustained inflows signal structural demand, while intermittent flows indicate tactical positioning, with consistency mattering more than magnitude,” said Timothy Misir, head of research at BRN, in an email.

Bitcoin is trading just above $75,000 after hitting highs above $78,000 on Friday, according to CoinDesk data. The prices has largely held steady over the past 24 hours. Similar patterns are evident in ether (ETH), $XRP ($XRP), Solana ($SOL) and other major tokens.

DeFi platform Aave’s AAVE token has dropped 1% to $90 as the protocol faces collateral damage from the weekend hack of KelpDAO. The DeFi dominance rate, which measures the share of DeFi coins in the total crypto market value, has held flat at around 3%.

“The pressure on the leading cryptocurrency is linked to negative reactions in stock markets to news about Iran, which has reduced risk appetite. BTC has lagged significantly behind equities in recent days, building potential but not yet moving to realize it,” Alex Kuptsikevich, the chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email.

According to the latest reports, the U.S. attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship attempting to bypass restrictions on Iran’s ports.

Meanwhile, traders are actively building short positions, betting against a breakout. This could fuel a “short squeeze” if prices hold steady, forcing traders to cover bearish bets and potentially pushing spot prices higher. Stay alert!

Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”

What’s trending

• The $292 million Kelp exploit: how it happened, and what it means for DeFi (CoinDesk): Aave saw about a $6.6 billion drop in total value locked on the protocol as users yanked assets following the incident, raising “bank run” concerns. The token linked with the protocol fell about 15%.
• Hack at Vercel sends crypto developers scrambling to lock down API keys (CoinDesk): The incident is drawing scrutiny because Vercel underpins front-end infrastructure for many crypto apps and is the primary steward of Next.js, one of the most widely used web development frameworks.
• Hormuz traffic at standstill as U.S. vessel seizure widens risk (Bloomberg): Commercial traffic through the strait is at a virtual standstill after a brief reopening over the weekend ended with the first U.S. seizure of an Iranian vessel. A fragile truce is due to expire at the end of Tuesday.
• Stocks are back at records, but bond investors haven’t joined the party (The Wall Street Journal): While the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite indexes are at all-time highs, worries about lasting damage to Middle East energy infrastructure have kept longer-dated oil futures well above their prewar levels.

Today’s signal

The chart shows weekly price swings in solana ($SOL), with each candle showing a full week of trading activity, including the opening, closing, high and low prices.

One level stands out: $95.16, the low registered in April.

$SOL has remained below that level for 11 consecutive weeks after dropping below it in early February. In technical analysis, a level that previously acted as “support,” a price floor where buying interest tends to emerge, often becomes “resistance” once it is broken. That means traders who previously bought around that level may now look to sell if prices revisit it, limiting upside momentum.

The fact that $SOL has not yet climbed back points to a sustained bearish sentiment and potential for deeper losses. The next major support is seen directly at $50.

A strong move above that level, backed by a surge in trading volumes, is needed to invalidate the bearish outlook.

The crypto market is trading back in familiar territory following a short-lived spike to its highest point since early February on Friday.

Bitcoin is trading a hair under $75,000 while ether ($ETH) is at $2,300, both significantly lower than Friday’s highs of $78,300 and $2,460.

One reason for traders to be bullish is that the bitcoin futures market on the CME, a venue favored by institutions, closed at $77,540 on Friday and opened at $74,600 to create “CME gap” that spans 3.8% to the upside. A similar gap occurred last week and was filled before the end of the day on Monday.

The first steps have been taken: Bitcoin’s gained 1.5% since midnight UTC, suggesting sentiment is warming following a volatile weekend.

The market tumbled over the weekend as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz came to a halt after opening on Friday. The renewed closure led to a jump in the price of crude oil from $78 to $88 per barrel.

This weighed on risk assets, with Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 futures both down by 0.59% since midnight.

Derivatives positioning

• Marketwide, crypto open interest (OI) held steady near $120 billion over the past 24 hours. Trading volume, in contrast, jumped 30%, suggesting a surge in activity without a corresponding increase in new positions. That potentially points to increased turnover, short-term positioning or traders rotating risk rather than deploying fresh capital.
• OI in solana (SOL), bitcoin , ether ($ETH) and $XRP ($XRP) held largely steady. OI in HYPE futures declined by 3% alongside as the price fell, pointing to capital outflows. Elsewhere, OI in AVAX and SP 500 perpetuals rose by 6% to 10%, respectively.
• OI in $AAVE futures surged to a record high of 3.46 million tokens as collateral damage from the weekend exploit of KelpDAO led to rapid withdrawals of from the Aave lending platform.
• Funding rates tied to $BTC, $ETH and several other tokens flipped negative, indicating a bias for short positions that would benefit from a price drop in these tokens.
• $BTC and $ETH options on Deribit continue to trade pricier than calls in a sign of lingering downside concern.
• Block flows featured bias for $BTC call spreads, which are directional bets, and ether straddles, a volatility play.

Token talk

• The altcoin sector was rocked by a $292 million exploit of Kelp DAO’s rsETH token over the weekend, leading to contagion risks across the DeFi market.
• Total value locked (TVL) on Aave dropped from $26.5 billion to $17.5 billion as a result, with the exploit sparking fears of bad debt hitting Aave’s WETH pool, triggering heavy withdrawals and a liquidity crunch.
• Aave’s token, $AAVE, rose 2.2% on Monday after tumbling 22% on Saturday.
• The bitcoin-dominant CoinDesk 20 (CD20) Index advanced 1% on Monday, outperforming the altcoin-weighted CoinDesk 80 (CD80) and the DeFi Select Index (DFX), which are up by 0.6% and 0.9%, respectively.
• One particularly volatile token is celestia (TIA), which remains 3.9% down over the past 24 hours even after surging by more than 4% since midnight.
• CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is at 36/100, demonstrating investor preference for bitcoin following Friday’s short-lived breakout.

Although the price of Bitcoin ($BTC) increases numerically in each cycle, its actual upward momentum and potential are decreasing.

Galaxy Digital research head Alex Thorn argues that the current Bitcoin market cycle is dramatically weaker compared to the previous three cycles.

At this point, Thorn compared the price movements since the Bitcoin halving in April 2024 to the 2012, 2016, and 2020 cycles.

The study concluded that volatility has significantly decreased in the current cycle and the upside potential is lower.

Although Bitcoin reached its all-time high of over $125,000 on October 5, 2025, it only managed to surpass 97% of its 2024 halving price of approximately $63,000. According to the analyst, this indicates that the peak of the cycle so far has been significantly calmer compared to other cycles.

This increase is quite small compared to other cycles. According to historical data, in the 2012 halving cycle, the $BTC price increased by approximately 9,294%, rising to $1,163. In 2016, it approached $19,891 with an increase of approximately 2,950%, and finally, in the 2020 cycle, a gain of approximately 761% was observed.

According to the analyst, the decreasing volatility with each new $BTC halving cycle indicates that traditional market dynamics are changing and that the price is becoming more influenced by factors other than the four-year halving cycle theory.

While bull cycles in Bitcoin are becoming less frequent, Fidelity analysts also note that with decreasing volatility, Bitcoin declines are becoming less severe.

At this point, according to Zack Wainwright, research analyst at Fidelity Digital Assets, declines in previous Bitcoin bear markets ranged from 80% to 90%. However, in the latest cycle, Bitcoin’s drop from its all-time high of $125,000 to $60,000 represents a decline of approximately 50%.

*This is not investment advice.

Neo co-founder Erik Zhang has launched transparency.neo.org, a public disclosure portal that commits the Neo Foundation’s temporary committee to continuously publishing every on-chain use of funds under its control. The portal delivers on a financial-transparency commitment Zhang made when he announced the committee earlier this month.

The site operationalizes Zhang’s April 14 disclosure of the primary NF fund address he controls, NVg7LjGcUSrgxgjX3zEgqaksfMaiS8Z6e1. When Zhang announced the temporary committee, he pledged to publicly disclose every funding decision it makes. In his announcement on X, Zhang wrote:

After disclosing the address, the next step is to disclose the spending records. I have already launched a public page to continuously disclose every use of funds promoted by, or decided with the participation of, the temporary committee, subject to community oversight.

Four disclosure principles guide the site:

• Timeliness,
• Clear purpose, with each expenditure having its purpose, amount, asset type, and relevant context noted,
• On-chain verifiability, with address or transaction details provided where applicable, and
• Community oversight, including the ability for the community to raise inquiries based on the public records

Records can be filtered by date, status (executed, pending, or under review), asset type, and keyword. The Update Policy holds the committee accountable to record-by-record disclosure and states that the portal may become a location for long-term financial transparency once a new governance mechanism is established.

Initial records

As of April 19, the portal lists two executed records, covering 280,000 $NEO and 1 $GAS, drawn from the single disclosed address.

The first is a 1 $GAS administrative transfer described as “1 $GAS used to activate the temporary committee account, as transfers cannot be executed without $GAS.”

The second is a 280,000 $NEO disbursement categorized as Payroll & Operations. It is described as operating expenses and staff salaries covering the period from October 2025 to April 2026.

The seven-month coverage period coincides with Zhang’s earlier public statement that NF staff, community members, and his own compensation had gone unpaid for an extended period before the committee’s formation. The portal does not break down the 280,000 $NEO figure by recipient or role. The make up of the committee has not been disclosed.

Context

The launch arrives amid an unresolved governance dispute between Zhang and Neo co-founder Da Hongfei, each of whom has published NF reform proposals.

The temporary NF committee established by Zhang is expected to be dissolved once the community accepts a new governance mechanism. Until then, new records on the NF financial transparency website will document how the committee uses funds during the interim.

Zhang noted, “Financial transparency cannot remain at the level of statements. It must be reflected in public records that are verifiable, traceable, and continuously updated.”

The full announcement can be found at the link below:
https://x.com/erikzhang/status/2045434833825042652

Binance CEO Richard Teng announced a remarkable increase in weekend trading volumes in traditional asset-based futures. According to data shared by Teng via X, weekend trading volume in the exchange’s perpetual contracts tied to traditional financial assets rose by approximately 300 percent between January and March.

According to the statement, one of the most notable increases occurred during the weekend of February 28 – March 1. During this period, the total trading volume for these products reached $8.1 billion. Teng stated that this growth indicates increased investor demand for access to traditional markets even on weekends.

Binance’s products allow users to access price movements of traditional assets like stocks seamlessly, 24/7. This gives investors the opportunity to trade even when traditional financial markets are closed.

According to experts, this development increases the competition between derivative products offered by crypto exchanges and traditional finance, while also expanding liquidity in the markets. At the same time, this trend, which signals a shift in investor behavior, reveals that financial markets are evolving into an increasingly seamless and global structure.

Richard Teng’s assessments show that crypto platforms are not limited to digital assets but also offer a new transaction infrastructure for traditional financial products.

*This is not investment advice.

South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has announced it will list another digital asset. According to the official announcement, $PIEVERSE ($PIEVERSE) will be available for trading on the platform with KRW, BTC, and USDT trading pairs. The token will be supported on the Ethereum network.

According to the announcement, deposit and withdrawal operations for $PIEVERSE will open approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes after the announcement is published.

Trading support is scheduled to begin on April 20th at 4:00 PM. However, the exchange stated that the start time of trading may be postponed if sufficient liquidity cannot be provided.

Upbit will implement some restrictions at the start of trading to ensure user security. Accordingly, buy orders will be restricted for the first 5 minutes after trading opens.

During the same period, sell orders below 10 percent of the previous day’s closing price will also not be allowed. Furthermore, only limit orders will be available for the first two hours.

According to $PIEVERSE’s latest price data, as of April 20th at 13:30, the token’s price is 1,874 KRW.

The project aims to reshape the payment infrastructure within the Web3 ecosystem. $PIEVERSE seeks to offer an “agent-native” payment system encompassing transactions between humans, artificial intelligence, and machines.

The platform, which aims to eliminate gas fees, plans to establish a compliance-focused structure with timestamped and auditable transactions. The token will be used in staking, governance, and reward mechanisms.

*This is not investment advice.

Ethereum Name Service gateway eth.limo has revealed that the domain hijacking on Friday was caused by a social engineering attack directed against EasyDNS, its domain name service provider.

According to a postmortem published by eth.limo on Saturday, an attacker impersonated one of its team members to initiate an account recovery process with easyDNS, granting access to the eth.limo account and allowing them to alter domain settings.

“The NS records were changed and directed to Cloudflare… Once we understood that a DNS hijack had taken place, we immediately notified the community as well as Vitalik Buterin and others. We then began contacting EasyDNS in an attempt to respond to the incident,” the company said.

Eth.limo serves as a Web2 bridge, providing access to around 2 million decentralized websites using the .eth domain name. Hijacking the service could allow an attacker to redirect users to malicious websites. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned users Friday to avoid his blog until the incident was resolved.

Mark Jeftovic, CEO of easyDNS, has publicly accepted responsibility for the incident in its own postmortem report.

“We screwed up and we own it,” said Jeftovic on Saturday.

“This would mark the first successful social engineering attack against an easyDNS client in our 28-year history. There have been countless attempts.”

Both companies have pointed to the Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC) in thwarting the hacker’s attempts to do further damage.

The attacker couldn’t produce valid cryptographic signatures, so Domain Name System resolvers rejected the attacker’s forged DNS responses, causing users to see error messages instead of being redirected to malicious sites.

“DNSSEC was enabled for their domain when the attackers attempted to flip their nameservers, presumably to effect some manner of phishing or malware injection attack, DNSSEC-aware resolvers, which most are these days, began dropping queries,” Jeftovic said.

In its postmortem, eth.limo noted that because the attacker lacked the signing keys, they were unable to bypass the safeguards, which likely “reduced the blast radius of the hijack. We are not aware of any user impact at this time. We will provide updates if that changes.”

easyDNS makes changes since the attack

Jeftovic described the social engineering attack as “highly sophisticated,” and said easyDNS is still conducting a post-mortem on how the breach occurred, and has already begun rolling out changes to prevent a recurrence.

“In eth.limo’s case, we will be migrating them to Domainsure, which has a security posture more suited toward enterprise and high-value fintech domains, TLDR there is no mechanism for an account recovery on Domainsure, it’s not a thing,” he added.

“On behalf of everyone here, I apologize to the eth.limo team and the wider Ethereum community. $ENS has always had a special place in our heart as the first registrar to enable $ENS linking to web2 domains and we’ve been involved in the space since 2017.”

The eth.limo incident is the latest in a series of domain hijackings targeting crypto projects. Days earlier, decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Swap lost control of its website after an unknown party hijacked its domain.

Steakhouse Financial, a DeFi advisory and research firm, similarly disclosed at the end of March that it had lost control of its domain to an attacker.

Bitcoin is absorbing the return of Middle East risk better than oil or equities.

Bitcoin traded at $74,335 on Monday morning, down 1.6% over 24 hours but still up 4.8% on the week after the U.S. Navy seized an Iranian ship over the weekend and Tehran reimposed controls on the Strait of Hormuz.

Ether slipped 2.6% to $2,272, Solana fell 1.5% to $84, and BNB held flat at $618, with the broader top-10 showing red across the board but none of the moves breaching 3%.

Brent crude jumped 5.7% to $95.50 a barrel, European natural gas futures surged as much as 11%, S&P 500 futures fell 0.6% after Friday’s record close, and European equity futures indicated a 1.2% drop at the open. Gold fell 0.8% to $4,790, and the dollar edged up as traditional war-hedge demand returned.

The weekend flare-up reversed a three-week unwind of war risk premium. Iran had declared the Strait “completely open” on Friday, prompting the S&P 500’s record close and a broad rally across emerging markets.

By Sunday morning, Trump was threatening to destroy every power plant and bridge in Iran if negotiations fail, and Tehran was signaling it may skip a second round of talks while the U.S. maintains its naval blockade.

This is the fourth major Iran-related risk event crypto has absorbed since the conflict began, and the pattern of shrinking sell-offs continues. Earlier escalations produced sharper drawdowns in bitcoin than this one, with each successive flare-up compressing the magnitude of the crypto reaction even as oil and equities continue to price each headline fresh.

The divergence suggests crypto has largely finished pricing the geopolitical tail risk that traditional markets are still reacting to, either because holders who were going to sell on Iran headlines have already sold, or because the spot ETF bid has become a more reliable floor than the futures-driven weekend gaps that defined earlier cycles.

What traders will watch through the U.S. session is whether the 10-year Treasury yield holding near 4.27% and the dollar bid pull bitcoin lower through the risk-parity channel, or whether the equity correlation that dominated Q1 loosens on a day when the driver is explicitly geopolitical rather than macro-liquidity.

If bitcoin holds $74,000 through the European open and the Strait of Hormuz situation deteriorates further, the asset’s emerging reputation as a geopolitical shock absorber gains another data point. If the move extends below $73,000 on any incremental Iran headline, the shrinking-sell-off thesis breaks.