Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and one of the most prominent figures in the industry known for his bold predictions for Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins, has begun supporting a new altcoin.
Accordingly, Arthur Hayes announced that he has begun supporting Worldcoin ($WLD), which is at the center of the controversy.
Hayes, posting from account X, shared a chart related to $WLD and also set a price target for the token.
Hayes, noting Worldcoin’s rise, set a target of $10 for the token.
Related NewsArthur Hayes is very insistent on this altcoin! He bet it will surpass Solana!
The World project, founded by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, has been the subject of much controversy since its inception. Its use of IRIS data for identity verification has led to bans and investigations by various countries.
However, upon its release, $WLD, which had surged to $11 during the 2024 AI rally, fell to as low as $0.2.
$WLD, which has risen by 20% in the last 24 hours and more than 100% in the last month, is still trading at $0.50 at the time of writing.
Strategy’s (MSTR) recent bitcoin sale has had an outsized impact on market sentiment, but Wall Street bank Citi does not see the move as changing the company’s long-term strategy.
The bank said the sale was anticipated after Strategy signaled plans to dispose of certain tax-disadvantaged bitcoin holdings during its first-quarter earnings call as part of a portfolio optimization effort.
“Recent flows have been negative, and the chances for the passage of a U.S. market structure bill (a potential catalyst for renewed investor interest in our view) are diminishing,” analyst Alex Saunders wrote in the Tuesday report.
Markets were rattled this week after Strategy disclosed the sale of a small portion of its bitcoin holdings, marking a rare departure from Executive Chairman Michael Saylor’s long-standing “buy and hold” approach.
While the company said the transaction was tied to tax-planning considerations, the move sparked concerns that one of bitcoin’s most influential corporate backers could become a seller, contributing to a bout of weakness in $BTC and renewed scrutiny of the digital asset treasury model.
Saunders continues to view spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows as the primary driver of $BTC prices, estimating they account for about 45% of weekly return variation. The analyst said recent ETF flows have turned negative, highlighting a broader lack of investor demand for the cryptocurrency.
While digital asset treasury companies have emerged as important buyers of bitcoin, the analyst does not believe treasury-related selling is a major factor behind the recent weakness. Instead, the bank argued ETF flows remain the clearest high-frequency measure of investor adoption and appetite.
The report also warned that the chances of a U.S. crypto market structure bill passing this year appear to be declining, reducing the likelihood of a near-term catalyst for fresh investor inflows.
Combined with bitcoin’s underperformance relative to equities, the fading legislative outlook is likely to keep sentiment muted absent regulatory progress or renewed concerns about fiscal sustainability, the report added.
The disclosure of Strategy’s first bitcoin sale in years weighed on sentiment this week, fueling concerns about potential selling by digital asset treasury firms and pushing $BTC lower. The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading around $67,200 at the time of publication.
Read more: Bitcoin faces outsized quantum threat as computing breakthroughs accelerate, Citi says
The sharp decline that began after the institutional bull strategy’s Bitcoin sell-off caused Bitcoin ($BTC) to fall as low as $66,000 in the morning hours. While this rapid and significant drop raises questions about whether the $BTC price will retest the $60,000 level seen in February, some market experts expect the summer months to be challenging as well.
In her latest report, Vetle Lunde, Head of Research at K33 Research, stated that funds in the market are flowing into AI stocks and that Bitcoin will experience a volatile summer during this period.
K33 Research suggests Bitcoin could face a challenging summer due to capital shifting towards AI stocks, weakening institutional demand, massive outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, and increasingly fragile derivatives market conditions.
Lunde stated that, in this environment, he believes the cost of holding Bitcoin is too high amidst the overall rise in AI-related assets in the market.
“Investors feel that holding Bitcoin is costly. With AI stocks rising sharply, they don’t see it as wise to stay here. They don’t want to miss out on the rally in this area. There’s a flight from Bitcoin to AI.”
At this point, Lunde noted that there were clear signs of funds shifting to other areas: “Bitcoin failed to recover from its 200-day moving average, while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 continued to reach new highs. Investors are also focusing on potential IPOs of companies like SpaceX and Anthropic, further distancing funds from the crypto market. The spot Bitcoin ETF experienced a drop of 62,794 $BTC in the last three weeks, the second-largest consecutive outflow in history.”
“For these reasons, we expect a challenging summer period as investors reduce risks and no additional capital inflow is expected.”
In contrast, K33 Research states that it believes Bitcoin is still undervalued in the long term. However, it warns that declining demand and leveraged positions could lead to deeper declines and a volatile market.
At some point, the progress of the crypto sector’s top policy priority — the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — becomes an insurmountable math problem, with not enough time left in the U.S. Senate’s work calendar to allow for passage. But the bill has now been formally offered for the Senate calendar, and the industry’s lobbyists are still shooting for a last-moment win.
There are about eight weeks of floor time available in the Senate before the lawmakers scatter for the summer break and the political demands of the midterm congressional elections. And as the election season grows more urgent, the appetite for legislative cooperation could also take a hit.
In that brief work window in Congress’ upper chamber, the Clarity Act would need to go through several procedural steps that can only begin once the market structure bill is finalized — a goal that still requires some big-ticket disputes to get ironed out between the political parties and the White House.
The Clarity Act would establish a tailored regulatory regime for crypto in the U.S. — an idea that carries significant bipartisan support. But even if the bill were ready for action, a significant array of Senate business items are competing for time and attention. And some of them haven’t been going very well.
A deadline is looming this month for extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and getting a long-term deal on U.S. spy powers has been a challenge, including over the insertion of a ban on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Senate leadership had warned that the CBDC component could kill the effort in that chamber, and an impasse had set in between the House of Representatives and Senate that’s still being resolved, but the latest version of the bill reportedly includes a temporary ban that ends in three years.
Even more fireworks, though, had erupted from the process to approve an immigration-enforcement funding bill. The spending plan was derailed by an internal outcry from Republicans opposing President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion Department of Justice “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate allies. A court ordered the plan halted during the dispute over its legality, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly gave in to the pressure on Tuesday to assure lawmakers that the idea is dead, which is expected to re-open the path for the immigration bill.
Must-pass bills
Those two bills — FISA and immigration — must pass in order for aspects of the federal government to continue functioning, giving them priority over other work. Crypto lobbyists are expressing quiet confidence that they’ll be resolved soon.
But once they’re approved, that doesn’t necessarily mean smooth sailing for the crypto bill, which was formally forwarded to the Senate calendar this week.
Adding some potential drama has been President Trump’s insistence that one of the legislative efforts — FISA or a bill overhauling U.S. housing regulations — be saddled with his effort to impose voter identification and proof of citizenship at the polls before the congressional midterm elections, which he has said will lead to his impeachment if Democrats win. Adding that controversial bill atop another would sharply decrease the odds of its host bill’s passage, but Trump has previously threatened to halt congressional progress on other matters if lawmakers don’t make it happen.
That housing bill he’s looking at may be among the Clarity Act’s big competitors for floor time. The bipartisan legislation to encourage U.S. home building (while also restricting certain institutional investors) has been lobbed back and forth by the House and Senate, but leaders in the two chambers are reportedly working on a version that will satisfy both. Even if it all goes well, the Senate calendar is a zero-sum proposition at this stage, meaning every hour devoted to anything that isn’t Clarity reduces the odds for the chamber having enough bandwidth for the bill.
The Senate is also wrestling with a debate over a war-powers resolution aimed at halting U.S. military action in Iran. And the coming days are also expected to see action on the legislation known as the farm bill that may get a hearing in the Senate Agriculture Committee that’s also supposed to be working on a final version of the Clarity Act, plus potential movement on the National Defense Authorization Act for next year.
Summer plans
Though White House officials had expressed an Independence Day goal for the Clarity Act to clear Congress at the start of next month, various lawmakers have suggested end-of-July timing or even early August — the final week before the start of the long congressional break.
“Under my Leadership, we will codify a FUTURE-PROOF Digital Asset Market Structure that cannot be undone by the Crypto Haters,” the president wrote in a recent post on his social-media site. “The new Frontier of Finance is being Built in America, and ‘TRUMP’ will NEVER let Crypto down!”
His codifying promise may be dependent on what Trump is willing to allow into the Clarity Act involving an ethics provision aimed straight at him: banning government officials from personal stakes in the crypto industry. A bill without such limits is widely considered to be a dealbreaker for Senate Democrats, but crypto insiders are suggesting that a runway period has been raised that may not force Trump to divest from his own interests.
The Clarity Act recently cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a narrow bipartisan vote that drew loud fanfare from the industry. But a party-line approval of a parallel version in the Senate Agriculture Committee is now being litigated on certain points to bring that committee’s Democrats on board, including the potential requirement that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — a leading regulator of crypto activity — get nominations from the White House to fill all four of its commissioner vacancies (two Republicans and two Democrats).
Ongoing fights
Lobbyists from the banking industry are also expected to keep hammering away at the bill, which includes a section on stablecoin yield that bankers see as a threat to their deposit base. And the decentralized finance (DeFi) interests are still trying to acquire more legal shielding for developers who don’t want to be punished for illicit usage of their work.
So the bill isn’t done, and crypto advocates in Washington say it hasn’t leapt into June with a particularly quick start. Once the legislation is finished, including combining the versions from the banking and agriculture panels and adding an ethics provision, Senate leadership would need to set up some floor time — potentially a full week (one of the precious eight remaining before the August recess).
If not by then, there’s another smidge of time in September, and then comes the biggest wild card of the congressional calendar: the so-called “lame duck” session in which the members of this Congress will keep working for about four weeks after the elections have effectively fired some of the lawmakers and others are retiring. Desperate deals have been made for significant legislation during those sessions, but the odds are long.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the digital assets subcommittee on the Senate banking panel, has been posting a steady stream of encouragement for pushing the Clarity Act.
“We are closer to a functioning digital asset market structure than we have ever been,” Lummis posted Tuesday on social media site X. “Now is not the time to flinch.”
Read More: Clarity Act clears U.S. Senate committee, on its way to a final test in Congress
Grayscale said Wednesday it launched a Hyperliquid ($HYPE) exchange-traded product (ETP) with the lowest fee among its U.S.-listed competitors, escalating a price war in one of crypto’s newest and fastest-growing ETF categories.
The asset manager announced the Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETF (HYPG) on Nasdaq, disclosing a 0.29% sponsor fee and confirming the ticker HYPG. The fee undercuts rival Hyperliquid products from both 21Shares and Bitwise and marks the first meaningful fee competition in the emerging market for $HYPE investment products.
21Shares’ Hyperliquid ETF, THYP, began trading on Nasdaq on May 12 with a 0.30% expense ratio. Bitwise’s BHYP launched three days later on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with a promotional 0% fee for its first month but will rise to 0.34%. On a normalized basis, Grayscale’s 0.29% fee is now the lowest among the three offerings.
The rapid emergence of multiple Hyperliquid funds reflects growing investor interest in the protocol behind the $HYPE token. Hyperliquid began as a decentralized perpetual futures exchange but has expanded into a broader blockchain ecosystem that supports smart contracts, tokenized assets and new financial markets.
Unlike traditional crypto ETFs that simply hold an underlying asset, HYPG is designed to generate additional returns through staking. The fund will seek exposure to $HYPE while participating in the network’s staking process, allowing investors to capture staking rewards through the ETF structure. Grayscale said $HYPE staking rewards have historically averaged about 2.2% annually.
The launch comes as Hyperliquid has emerged as one of the most closely watched projects in decentralized finance. According to Grayscale, the protocol generated approximately $857 million in revenue during 2025, making it one of the highest-earning applications in crypto.
Much of investor interest has centered on Hyperliquid’s economic model. Grayscale said roughly 99% of protocol fees are directed toward token buybacks, a mechanism supporters argue links network usage directly to $HYPE‘s value accrual.
“The launch of HYPG on Nasdaq reflects our conviction that Hyperliquid represents something genuinely differentiated in the digital asset landscape, a protocol built to support onchain trading and market activity at scale,” Krista Lynch, Grayscale’s senior vice president of capital markets, said in a statement.
The fund’s debut adds another sign that institutional investors are increasingly looking beyond bitcoin and ether toward crypto-native infrastructure projects that generate revenue and resemble traditional financial networks. Hyperliquid’s growth in perpetual futures trading, combined with its expansion into tokenized assets and other financial products, has led some analysts to view it as a potential building block for a broader onchain market infrastructure.
After briefly falling below $66,000 on Wednesday, bitcoin is trading near the bottom of the Power Law corridor, a level that has historically come shortly before rebounds in the price of the largest cryptocurrency.
The model, popularized by physicist Giovanni Santostasi and refined by Porkopolis Economics, plots bitcoin’s price against time on a logarithmic scale and suggests that growth slows naturally as the network matures. It has tracked bitcoin’s price trajectory for more than a decade.
Unlike traditional cycle-based models that focus on the rate at which new bitcoin is created — it’s cut by 50% roughly every four years — the Power Law argues that bitcoin follows a long-term mathematical trend similar to patterns observed in nature, where growth decelerates over time.
According to checkonchain data, the Power Law Oscillator shows that when measured against the model, bitcoin has been more expensive than it is today for roughly 95.6% of its trading history.
Previous visits to these levels have coincided with periods of extreme market stress, including the March 2020 pandemic-driven selloff and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in November 2022. Both events pushed bitcoin toward the lower edge of the model before significant recoveries followed.
While the Power Law offers no guarantee the floor will hold again, long-term investors view the current reading as a sign that bitcoin is trading near one of its deepest historical discounts relative to trend.
China, which has strict restrictions on Bitcoin ($BTC) and cryptocurrencies, has issued a new ruling.
Accordingly, the Licang District Court in Qingdao City, China, ruled that Bitcoin constitutes property under criminal law.
According to the Chinese local news agency Shandong Legal Daily, the Licang District Court in China ruled that Bitcoin is considered property under criminal law in a case involving the theft of 107 $BTC.
The defendant, surnamed Zhang, was sentenced to 10 years and 9 months in prison and fined 100,000 yuan (approximately $13,800) for stealing funds by using the victim’s crypto wallet recovery statement.
The court ruling emphasized that Bitcoin meets the legal requirements for being considered property because it has economic value and can be exclusively controlled.
The value of the stolen Bitcoin was estimated to be over $3 million, based on the more than 660,000 yuan (over $91,000) the defendant obtained by selling the stolen Bitcoin.
The decision was upheld on appeal and serves as a legal guideline against cybercrimes related to cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin and the broader crypto market steadied Wednesday from Tuesday’s slide after Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly listed bitcoin holder, sold a small portion of its stash and spot ETFs extended a record run of net outflows.
The cryptocurrency’s 14-day RSI has dropped below 30, a textbook oversold reading. The indicator measures the speed and magnitude of price movement over a two-week period.
While a reading below 30 suggests bearish momentum is dominant, analysts often read this as a sign that the selloff has been too rapid and could stall, allowing for a recovery. While not guaranteed, it’s a stance that has played out several times.
Oversold readings in early February, November 2025, late February 2025, and August 2024 marked interim or major price bottoms. So there are hopes the selloff may soon ease.
Some analysts are more cautious. “Blood is in the water, trade accordingly,” Monarq Asset Management said in a Telegram chat.
“With the long‑anticipated regulatory clarity from the CLARITY Act looking less likely every day (Jamie Dimon openly hostile, pulling no punches, using DC clout to position against it), value and speculative buyers are stepping back and looking for the long‑term, long‑anticipated capitulation move,” Monarq CIO Sam Gaer told CoinDesk.
According to Gaer, $60,000 is back in focus and a break below that level could trigger a sell‑off to as low as $45,000, as forecast by the theory that the $BTC price follows a four‑year cycle.
QCP Capital noted a spike in $BTC implied volatility, saying the message is less “buy the dip” and more “please insure the dip before discussing it.”
Broadly speaking, weakening institutional and corporate bids and Fed rate‑hike concerns limit the scope for a sustainable recovery even as the RSI hints at a potential bounce. According to QCP, $BTC needs to hold above $67,000 to restore bullish sentiment. 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
Bullish crypto bets lose $1.6 billion as ETH, SOL, DOGE drop 9% (CoinDesk): Crypto traders hoping the market would catch up to the global stock rally were left nursing tears on Wednesday as a sharp price drop triggered the largest liquidation event since early February.
Prediction market traders bet bitcoin’s selloff has further to run (CoinDesk): Markets now imply a 66% chance of bitcoin falling below $55,000 and a coin-flip chance of sub-$50,000 prices before year-end.
SpaceX is worth less than half of its $1.75 trillion IPO target, Morningstar says (CNBC): With SpaceX expected to start trading on the Nasdaq in just over two weeks, Morningstar analysts say it is “significantly overvalued.”
Hostilities flare in Iran war, oil jumps with talks at a stalemate (Reuters): The flare-up, which sent oil prices rising more than 1%, comes with the conflict stalemated in a shaky ceasefire and the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, more than three months after initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.
Today’s signal
The chart shows bitcoin’s daily price swings in candlestick format with the 14-day relative strength index in the lower panel.
The RSI has slipped below 30, suggesting oversold conditions. Similar readings have previously marked interim or temporary price bottoms.
Bitcoin’s aggressive break below $70,000 has shifted the market from a debate over dip-buying to a more defensive question of how far traders now need to insure against the next leg lower.
Data from CryptoSlate showed that the largest cryptocurrency fell to as low as $65,404 over the past day, triggering $1.8 billion in liquidations and wiping out bullish leverage that had built around hopes of a quick recovery.
Crypto Market Liquidation (Source: CoinGlass)
This failed rebound has pushed traders toward protection at levels that only recently looked distant.
Options positioning now shows demand building around the $60,000 and $50,000 strikes, a sign that investors are preparing for a deeper reset as Strategy’s first Bitcoin sale in years, ETF outflows, AI-driven capital rotation and unresolved macro pressure weaken the sources of support that carried the market earlier in the year.
How $BTC‘s failed bounce turned $70,000 into resistance
Analysts at BIT Official noted that Bitcoin was already trading defensively after sliding towards $72,000 last week, when geopolitical tensions tied to the Strait of Hormuz prompted a broad retreat from risk assets.
The firm noted that a brief reprieve materialized after President Donald Trump suggested the US would lift a naval blockade, while April core PCE inflation aligned with expectations at 3.3% year-over-year.
This data and political development eased immediate macroeconomic anxieties and forced over-leveraged bears to cover their shorts.
As a result, Bitcoin briefly spiked toward $73,400 over the weekend, giving bulls leverage to argue the selloff was exhausted.
However, that narrative collapsed when the recovery failed to attract meaningful spot volume.
When Iran’s foreign ministry explicitly denied nuclear talks, disputed Trump’s uranium claims, and insisted the strait would reopen strictly on its own timeline, the geopolitical relief trade vanished. Without a formal de-escalation, Bitcoin was left entirely exposed.
Consequently, the market was quickly dragged back to $70,000, which is a critical juncture where options positioning, market psychology, and short-term holder cost bases converged.
Indeed, that level had served as both a psychological floor for bulls and a prime target for bears hunting for forced liquidations.
Once Bitcoin sliced through that support, automated liquidation engines began aggressively unwinding undercollateralized long positions.
The decline further accelerated rapidly into a vacuum, as spot buyers proved unwilling to absorb the selling pressure.
Strategy’s sale gives bears a cleaner script
$BTC‘s decline under $70,000 also came at a highly vulnerable moment when the corporate treasury narrative fractured.
This week, Strategy confirmed that it sold 32 $BTC for $2.5 million to fund cash distributions and dividend payments on its high-yield perpetual preferred stock.
The sale came as a shock to the market because Strategy had positioned itself as the definitive corporate proxy for the Bitcoin accumulation trade.
Over the past years, the Michael Saylor-led company business model relied heavily on equity issuance, preferred stock, and uninhibited access to capital markets to construct the largest public-company Bitcoin treasury in existence.
To the broader market, the company was not just a major holder but also a symbol of permanent, price-agnostic demand.
However, that perception is now under enormous strain as the firm most synonymous with the “never sell” philosophy liquidated coins to meet a routine cash obligation.
Jeff Dorman, the CIO of Arca, noted:
“From a sentiment standpoint, how do you think the average Bitcoin investor is going to react when every major news outlet and social media influencer starts writing that “MicroStrategy is now a seller of $BTC”? This company has bought over $50 bn of Bitcoin, and currently owns roughly 4% of the total 21 million outstanding.”
That pivot armed bears with a clean, simple argument right as Bitcoin slipped below major support.
Market observers argued that the sale complicates the market’s base-case assumption that Strategy will act as an uninterrupted buyer in all macroeconomic environments.
In fact, some have postulated that the firm could make more sales in the future in order to actively manage its balance sheet.
AI’s liquidity pull leaves Bitcoin without its ETF cushion
This structural shift in sentiment coincides with the evaporation of Bitcoin’s most reliable safety net: the institutional ETF bid that anchored the earlier stages of the bull run.
According to SoSoValue data, Bitcoin ETFs have bled more than $4 billion over the trailing four weeks. This marks the most aggressive redemption cycle since the spot products debuted, starving the market of the steady inflows required to absorb routine selloffs.
Bitcoin ETFs Outflows (Source: SoSoValue)
Market analysts attribute this severe capital flight to a generational rotation into artificial intelligence.
Institutional allocators are actively liquidating crypto positions to free up dry powder for a looming wave of tech mega-IPOs, primarily targeting high-growth ventures like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Pierre Rochard, CEO of the Bitcoin Bond Company, pointed out that this AI boom has added $19 trillion in market capitalization to the top 50 public equities over the past 12 months, roughly 13 times Bitcoin’s total market value.
He said that capital expenditure cycle is drawing liquidity and attention away from Bitcoin, making the asset’s resilience notable despite the pressure.
Independent Bitcoin analyst Matthew Case described the move as an “AI IPO liquidity vacuum,” arguing that institutions that rode Bitcoin and crypto exposure higher now have a rare chance to position for major private-market and pre-IPO opportunities tied to SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI.
This capital rotation aggressively starves Bitcoin of its marginal buyer. During periods of robust ETF inflows, institutional demand acts as a shock absorber, cushioning the blow from macroeconomic friction, geopolitical headlines, and derivatives volatility.
With that bid suddenly sidelined, the market is dangerously exposed; a standard technical decline can cascade much further before encountering strong spot support.
$60,000 becomes the market’s next insurance level
Consequently, traders have fundamentally repriced their risk models. The market is no longer structured around highly leveraged bets anticipating a swift return to $70,000.
Instead, capital is aggressively repositioning for the reality that Bitcoin’s next durable line of defense may reside significantly lower.
Deribit data shows traders have built roughly $1.2 billion in open interest around the $60,000 strike, while the $50,000 strike has attracted about half that amount. Cumulatively, $1.8 billion worth of open interest are situated at these strike prices.
Bitcoin Traders Positioning in the Options Market (Source: Deribit)
The positioning marks a change from the structure that dominated earlier in the rally. When ETF inflows were strong and Strategy remained an unquestioned buyer, pullbacks were treated as opportunities to add exposure.
After the liquidation wave, ETF redemptions and Strategy’s sale, the same pullbacks are being treated as events that need to be insured.
As a result, traders with material Bitcoin exposure are moving toward puts and collar structures designed to preserve some upside while limiting losses if the drawdown accelerates.
