So far, crypto markets haven’t behaved as expected under the Trump Administration. Investors hoped that regulatory reform and policies like a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve would drive prices appreciably higher. But it’s been the opposite. Bitcoin has fallen from highs well above $100,000 at the beginning of the year to a trough in the mid-80,000s for most of March. Crypto prices have suffered from being increasingly correlated with traditional assets like stocks and bonds, which have been hit by macroeconomic uncertainty. Tariffs — surcharges the U.S. places on imports from other countries — have Wall Street worried about a global recession. Crypto investors have been steering clear of crypto assets, which are seen as relatively risky. “This is all about markets’ ‘risk appetite’ which continues to deteriorate, and for the time being drives a wedge between crypto assets and gold, which continues to be the ‘safe haven’ of choice,” said Marc Ostwald, Chief Economist & Global Strategist at ADM Investor Services International. “[That’s] in no small part driven by central bank FX reserve managers, who are seeking to reduce USD exposure, which has long been a source of concern to them.” As the global financial and trade system becomes more fragmented, investors are seeking alternatives to riskier assets, including dollars. For now, that means turning to gold, which is up 18% year-to-date. But that could change, said Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and author of "The Story of the Blockchain: A Beginner's Guide to the Technology That Nobody Understands." Bitcoin could be the new gold soon enough. “I think the entire [future] is uncertain and in some ways unknowable, because there are many crosscurrents and both crypto and tariffs are new. Some people argue that crypto is just a risk-on tech asset and would sell off due to tariffs. But bitcoin has found footing in some circles as ‘digital gold’ and the physical variety is soaring on the tariff news. So which will it be?” In other words, economic uncertainty could lead investors to seek out bitcoin just as they have sought out gold in recent months. Another note of positivity: the impact of tariffs on crypto could be “priced in” and the worst might be over already, said Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, a leading crypto asset management firm. President Trump is due to announce U.S. tariffs on Wednesday, April 2, at 4 p.m. ET—what’s known as “Liberation Day.” According to reports, he’ll lay out “reciprocal tariffs” against 15 countries that have levied tariffs against the U.S., including China, Canada and Mexico. Pandl estimates tariffs have so far taken 2% off economic growth this year. But Liberation Day might actually stop the worst of the pain felt in financial markets. “If we see an announcement [on Wednesday] that is tough but phased, and focused on the 15 countries they seem to be targeting, my expectation is that markets will rally on that news,” Pandl told CoinDesk. “Potentially once we get through this announcement, crypto markets can focus back on the fundamentals which are very positive.”Pandl said announcements like Circle’s IPO wouldn’t be happening if institutions didn’t have a high degree of confidence in the digital assets sector and the policies around it. Moreover, Pandl, a former macro-economist at Goldman Sachs, believes that tariffs will increase the appetite for currencies that aren’t dollars. “I think tariffs will weaken the dominant role of the dollar and create space for competitors including bitcoin. Prices have gone down in the short run. But the first few months of the Trump Administration have raised my conviction in the longer term for bitcoin as a global monetary asset.” Pendl still believes that bitcoin will hit new all-time highs this year, despite current pessimism around prices. “I wouldn’t have quit my Wall Street job if I didn’t think bitcoin will be the winner in the long term,” he said.

2025-04-02 04:28

Circle, the U.S.-based stablecoin issuer, is going public. The firm filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday. If approved, the company's stock will be trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CRCL." The company said its reserve income from managing its stablecoin-related reserves was $1.7 billion at the end of 2024, representing 99.1% of its total revenue. Circle is behind USDC, the second largest stablecoin by market capitalization, with $60 billion in supply. The firm's IPO has been one of the most anticipated in crypto. It's not the only crypto-adjacent company looking to go public. Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm CoreWeave (CRWV), which benefits from a strong business relationship with bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific (CORZ), started trading on the public market on March 28.

2025-04-01 23:46

Bitcoin (BTC) purchases from video game retailer GameStop (GME) could be imminent or may have already begun after the company closed on its offering of $1.3 billion of five-year convertible notes. The $200 million greenshoe option was fully exercised by the initial purchaser, bringing the total amount of the sale to $1.5 billion. Net proceeds to the company after fees were $1.48 billion, according to a filing Monday after the close of U.S. trading. Alongside its fourth quarter earnings report last week, GameStop — led by its CEO Ryan Cohen — announced full board approval of an update to the company investment policy to add bitcoin to the GME balance sheet. GME shares rose 1.35% during the regular session on Monday and are up another 0.8% in after hours action. Bitcoin remains modestly higher over the past 24 hours at $84,900.

2025-04-01 23:30

CoreWeave (CRWV) shares rose more than 38% on their third day of trading debut after raising nearly $1.5 billion from its IPO following OpenAi's announcement of a record-breaking $40 billion funding round on Monday. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup went public on the Nasdaq exchange on Friday afternoon. The stock dropped below its IPO price to $39 and ended the day flat at $40 before dropping another 10% on Monday, its first full day of trading. CoreWeave’s IPO came at a time of strong anxiety and uncertainty in global markets, diminishing investor appetite and risk tolerance. However, investor sentiment towards AI-related stocks seemed to have changed on Tuesday after AI powerhouse OpenAI announced on Monday that it had closed a $40 billion funding round , valuing the company at $300 billion. The move appears to have assured investors that there continues to be a strong appetite for AI companies, even in the current rough market. This positive outlook has also spread to digital assets, as AI-related tokens were boosted on Tuesday. AI tokens, including Near Protocol (NEAR), Internet Computer (ICP), Bittensor (TAO) and Render (RENDER), were all up over 3% on Tuesday, with RENDER leading the group, trading 7.4% higher. The broader digital assets market, CoinDesk20 Index , also rose 3%. Meanwhile, the shares of Core Scientific (CORZ), the bitcoin miner and data center with a large partnership with CoreWeave, have also risen more than 9% on Tuesday.

2025-04-01 22:48

Kristin Smith, the longtime chief executive of the Blockchain Association, a leading lobbying group for crypto policy in Washington, is leaving next month to take a role as president of the new Solana Policy Institute, according to a Tuesday announcement. "I am incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together and confident that the organization’s future is bright," Smith said in a statement. Earlier this week, Miller Whitehouse-Levine founded the organization and announced his position as CEO shortly after stepping down from the Defi Education Fund. Though the group hasn't yet clarified its source of funding, its website said it will focus its message on "how decentralized networks like Solana are the future of the digital economy." Smith has led the Blockchain Association for almost seven years — a dramatic period for the developing industry. Since late last year, the political grounds have solidified under the sector's feet as it finds allies running all levels of the U.S. government, where crypto advocates have long been trying to get a comprehensive set of regulations. The Blockchain Association has been a central player in the industry's lobbying. The organization said its board is now conducting a search to replace Smith. Whitehouse-Levin once worked in that organization's policy operations. "Innovators deserve to have the clarity they need to build a frictionless, Internet-based global economy — a future we believe is achievable with the right laws, rules and frameworks," he said in a statement during this week's launch of the Solana group. UPDATE (April 1, 2025, 19:09 UTC): Adds comment from Kristin Smith.

2025-04-01 22:01

Recently very shaky risk assets — crypto among them — are attempting a rally on Tuesday, perhaps. buoyed by chatter that Donald Trump's tariffs won't be as stringent as feared. In early afternoon U.S. action, bitcoin (BTC) had climbed to just above $85,000, ahead 2.1% over the past 24 hours. Previously really roughed up crypto majors like ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE) and cardano (ADA) had put in gains of roughly twice that amount. Crypto stocks are also performing well, with bitcoin miners Core Scientific (CORZ) and CleanSpark (CLSK) jumping almost 10% on the day. Strategy (MSTR) is up 5.4% and Coinbase (COIN) 2.1%. U.S. stocks reversed early session losses to turn higher as well, with the Nasdaq now ahead just shy of 1% for the day. The action comes ahead of the Trump administration’s so-called "Liberation Day" tariff rollout set for tomorrow after the close of U.S. trading. Hope? A report from NBC News suggested the market's most feared option — blanket 20% tariffs across the board — is "less likely" to be the direction taken by the White House. Instead, according to the report, a "tiered system" of different rates or country-by-country rates could be announced. Also maybe helping is what appears to be the first acknowledgement that the administration is aware of the market tumult resulting from all the tariff chatter. Speaking today at her daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that there were legitimate concerns about market swings. Meanwhile, Israel’s Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich announced on Tuesday that a process had been launched to get rid of tariffs on U.S. imports in that country.

2025-04-01 20:16

Web3 has a memory problem. Not in the “we forgot something” sense, but in the core architectural sense. It doesn’t have a real memory layer. Blockchains today don’t look completely alien compared to traditional computers, but a core foundational aspect of legacy computing is still missing: A memory layer built for decentralization that will support the next iteration of the internet. Muriel Médard is a speaker at Consensus 2025 May 14-16. Register to get your ticket here. After World War II, John von Neumann laid out the architecture for modern computers . Every computer needs input and output, a CPU for control and arithmetic, and memory to store the latest version data, along with a “bus” to retrieve and update that data in the memory. Commonly known as RAM, this architecture has been the foundation of computing for decades. At its core, Web3 is a decentralized computer — a “world computer.” At the higher layers, it’s fairly recognizable: operating systems (EVM, SVM) running on thousands of decentralized nodes, powering decentralized applications and protocols. But, when you dig deeper, something’s missing. The memory layer essential for storing, accessing and updating short-term and long term data, doesn’t look like the memory bus or memory unit von Neumann envisioned. Instead, it's a mashup of different best-effort approaches to achieve this purpose, and the results are overall messy, inefficient and hard to navigate. Here’s the problem: if we’re going to build a world computer that’s fundamentally different from the von Neumann model, there better be a really good reason to do so. As of right now, Web3’s memory layer isn’t just different, it’s convoluted and inefficient. Transactions are slow. Storage is sluggish and costly. Scaling for mass adoption with this current approach is nigh impossible. And, that’s not what decentralization was supposed to be about. But there is another way. A lot of people in this space are trying their best to work around this limitation and we're at a point now where the current workaround solutions just cannot keep up. This is where using algebraic coding, which makes use of equations to represent data for efficiency, resilience and flexibility, comes in. The core problem is this: how do we implement decentralized code for Web3? A new memory infrastructure This is why I took the leap from academia where I held the role of MIT NEC Chair and Professor of Software Science and Engineering to dedicate myself and a team of experts in advancing high-performance memory for Web3. I saw something bigger: the potential to redefine how we think about computing in a decentralized world. My team at Optimum is creating decentralized memory that works like a dedicated computer. Our approach is powered by Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), a technology developed in my MIT lab over nearly two decades. It’s a proven data coding method that maximizes throughput and resilience in high-reliability networks from industrial systems to the internet. Data coding is the process of converting information from one format to another for efficient storage, transmission or processing. Data coding has been around for decades and there are many iterations of it in use in networks today. RLNC is the modern approach to data coding built specifically for decentralized computing. This scheme transforms data into packets for transmission across a network of nodes, ensuring high speed and efficiency. With multiple engineering awards from top global institutions, more than 80 patents, and numerous real-world deployments, RLNC is no longer just a theory. RLNC has garnered significant recognition, including the 2009 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award for the work "A Random Linear Network Coding Approach to Multicast." RLNC's impact was acknowledged with the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award in 2022. RLNC is now ready for decentralized systems, enabling faster data propagation, efficient storage, and real-time access, making it a key solution for Web3’s scalability and efficiency challenges. Why this matters Let’s take a step back. Why does all of this matter? Because we need memory for the world computer that’s not just decentralized but also efficient, scalable and reliable. Currently, blockchains rely on best-effort, ad hoc solutions that achieve partially what memory in high-performance computing does. What they lack is a unified memory layer that encompasses both the memory bus for data propagation and the RAM for data storage and access. The bus part of the computer should not become the bottleneck, as it does now. Let me explain. “Gossip” is the common method for data propagation in blockchain networks. It is a peer-to-peer communication protocol in which nodes exchange information with random peers to spread data across the network. In its current implementation, it struggles at scale. Imagine you need 10 pieces of information from neighbors who repeat what they’ve heard. As you speak to them, at first you get new information. But as you approach nine out of 10, the chance of hearing something new from a neighbor drops, making the final piece of information the hardest to get. Chances are 90% that the next thing you hear is something you already know. This is how blockchain gossip works today — efficient early on, but redundant and slow when trying to complete the information sharing. You would have to be extremely lucky to get something new every time. With RLNC, we get around the core scalability issue in current gossip. RLNC works as though you managed to get extremely lucky, so every time you hear info, it just happens to be info that is new to you. That means much greater throughput and much lower latency. This RLNC-powered gossip is our first product, which validators can implement through a simple API call to optimize data propagation for their nodes. Let us now examine the memory part. It helps to think of memory as dynamic storage, like RAM in a computer or, for that matter, our closet. Decentralized RAM should mimic a closet; it should be structured, reliable, and consistent. A piece of data is either there or not, no half-bits, no missing sleeves. That’s atomicity. Items stay in the order they were placed — you might see an older version, but never a wrong one. That’s consistency. And, unless moved, everything stays put; data doesn’t disappear. That’s durability. Instead of the closet, what do we have? Mempools are not something we keep around in computers, so why do we do that in Web3? The main reason is that there is not a proper memory layer. If we think of data management in blockchains as managing clothes in our closet, a mempool is like having a pile of laundry on the floor, where you are not sure what is in there and you need to rummage. Current delays in transaction processing can be extremely high for any single chain. Citing Ethereum as an example, it takes two epochs or 12.8 minutes to finalize any single transaction. Without decentralized RAM, Web3 relies on mempools, where transactions sit until they’re processed, resulting in delays, congestion and unpredictability. Full nodes store everything, bloating the system and making retrieval complex and costly. In computers, the RAM keeps what is currently needed, while less-used data moves to cold storage, maybe in the cloud or on disk. Full nodes are like a closet with all the clothes you ever wore (from everything you’ve ever worn as a baby until now). This is not something we do on our computers, but they exist in Web3 because storage and read/write access aren’t optimized. With RLNC, we create decentralized RAM (deRAM) for timely, updateable state in a way that is economical, resilient and scalable. DeRAM and data propagation powered by RLNC can solve Web3’s biggest bottlenecks by making memory faster, more efficient, and more scalable. It optimizes data propagation, reduces storage bloat, and enables real-time access without compromising decentralization. It’s long been a key missing piece in the world computer, but not for long.

2025-04-01 20:14

Although Strategy’s (MSTR) aggressive buying of bitcoin (BTC) has sent its shares soaring over 2,500% over the past five years, one analyst argues that the reverse could soon be the case. “While we were negative on several respects upon initiation, we have gained incremental confidence that the convertible issuance strategy is likely tapped,” wrote Monness Crespi analyst Gus Gala, downgrading MSTR to sell just two weeks after initiating coverage at neutral. Strategy currently holds 528,185 BTC on its balance sheet and has been buying sizable quantities nearly every week for the past few months, mostly funded by common share issuance and also sales of its initial preferred series STRK. Gala's price target of $220 suggests just shy of 30% downside from the current price in the $300 area. Gala argued that it will become increasingly more difficult for MSTR to raise money to buy bitcoin via share issuance, forcing the company to shift towards fixed income vehicles. “If fixed income securities do not become a greater portion of issuance, the BTC treasury strategy will look increasingly challenged.” Gala noted that MSTR has already used $18.6 billion of its $21 billion common share at-the-market offering. The company also raised another $711 million last week via STRF, its second series of preferred stock.

2025-04-01 19:21

The U.S.' crypto-friendly stance could increase the level of risk in financial markets by deepening the connections between traditional finance (TradFi) and the digital asset economy, according to regulator the European Securities and Markets Authority. "This crypto-friendly stance has the potential to accelerate crypto adoption, including by institutional investors," a spokesperson for the European Union's financial markets regulator said in an interview. "This would in turn increase interconnectedness and, failing relevant safeguards, risks of negative spillover effects between crypto and traditional markets." Since becoming president on Jan. 20, Donald Trump has ordered his administration to set up a bitcoin reserve and urged it to establish crypto friendly policies . The crypto market had already reacted positively to Trump's election victory in November, and bitcoin (BTC) climbed to a record high around $109,000 on the day he was sworn in, CoinDesk data showed. In a joint report published Monday , ESMA, the European Banking Authority and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority identified "volatile crypto-asset valuations, driven by expectations of U.S. deregulatory policy agenda; increasing interconnections to traditional financial markets," as a key driver in financial markets. Separately, Piero Cipollone, an executive board member of the European Central Bank urged for a digital euro , an ECB-backed digital version of the single currency, to substitute for crypto assets, which he described as being "highly volatile and speculative in nature." "Furthermore, the United States’ push to maintain the dollar’s global dominance through the promotion of stablecoins worldwide presents its own set of challenges," he said.

2025-04-01 17:37