Cryptopolitan

On-chain activity shifted in the past month, as liquidity flowed into tokenized stocks. The total value locked in stock trading rose by around 60%, breaking above $1.6B.
Traders rushed to tokenized stocks, while the crypto market stagnated. At the same time, stocks offered more active gains, driven by demand for AI components. Tokenized stocks are seen as one of the promising products that may replace standard tokens.
In May 2025, tokenized stocks only amounted to around $30M and were mostly an experimental asset class. A year later, tokenized stocks have entered everyday trading, and some are used for DeFi lending.
Tokenized stocks increased their total value by 60% in the past month, breaking above $1.6B in total value locked. | Source: RWA.xyz
Tokenized stocks were among the niche classes, but the past two months shifted the trend. Stock tokenization follows the general trend of moving assets on-chain, but the expansion in the past two months is more active compared to other on-chain asset classes.
Growth in tokenized stocks even displaced commodities, which were one of the hottest asset classes in previous months. On-chain analysts predict up to $10B in tokenized stocks by the end of 2026.
In 2026 to date, demand for real-world assets also boosted perpetual futures trading. Over the past few months, over $821.8B of real-world assets were traded on decentralized markets, tapping the increased demand for stocks.
In May, commodities shrank their total value from $7.8B down to $7B, based on data from RWA.xyz.
Tokenized stocks still suffer from lack of predictable liquidity
On-chain markets are trying to solve a long-running issue of limited liquidity for tokenized stocks. Issuing tokenized assets is already well-established, but not all tokenized assets meet the same liquidity. According to TokenTerminal data, the RWA market has already expanded beyond $42B in value locked for all platforms and asset classes.
Ethereum is still the leading chain in a raw number of assets, including stablecoins. However, not all of those assets have suitable trading platforms, or are unknown to traders. Based on trading activity, BNB Chain is actually the most liquid venue for tokenized asset trading, based on recent Dune Analytics dashboards.
One of the factors behind on-chain stock trading is still Hyperliquid’s HIP-3, for its ability to offer custom markets and perpetual futures contracts. Overall, on-chain stock activity seeks the ability to trade directional price moves, rather than secure stock ownership.
Tokenized stocks are still limited by regulatory uncertainty and unclear ownership structure. Recently, trust in on-chain stocks was undermined by Anthropic’s decision to limit pre-IPO sales and exclude some buyers.
Crypto-native platforms lead in tokenized stocks
In the past year, a handful of crypto native platforms emerged as top venues for tokenized stocks. Robinhood’s Arbitrum bet had limited success, while Ondo, Solana, and Ethereum carried the most successful tokenized stock brands.
Tokenized stocks are trading on a handful of leading venues, with accelerating growth in May. | Source: Dune Analytics
A small addition to the growth in recent months came from PreStocks and Ondo on Solana. Solana XStocks turned into the most reliable source of liquid tokenized shares, tapping the most active companies in the past year.
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Russian fraudsters have transferred more than $4 billion worth of stolen funds through nearly a thousand providers of crypto exchange services active in the country.
The figures have come out as Russia prepares to outlaw most of these platforms and license mainly large financial institutions for crypto trading as part of upcoming regulations.
Russian fraudsters launder almost 300 billion rubles through crypto
Criminals defrauding Russian citizens have managed to launder some 295 billion rubles (over $4 billion) of stolen funds through crypto within a year.
That’s according to study conducted by Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, the results of which were announced by one of its top executives.
Quoted by the Interfax news agency on Tuesday, Deputy Chairman of Sber’s Management Board Stanislav Kuznetsov detailed:
“We have presented several figures here, based on analysis by Sberbank experts: nearly 300 billion rubles, or approximately $4 billion in stolen funds, are currently being withdrawn, one way or another, using cryptocurrency and crypto exchange offices.”
Speaking at an international security forum held this week near the Russian capital, Kuznetsov noted these are not proper trading venues for digital assets.
He made it clear he was referring to around 900 physical locations and online sites, including many on the darknet, that were active in the Russian Federation in 2025.
These platforms accept the illegally obtained funds, convert them into digital money and then back into fiat a few times, before they are eventually withdrawn as cash, the banker explained.
And when cybercriminals attack companies or other organizations, blocking their operations with malicious software, the ransom demanded is usually paid directly in cryptocurrency, he added.
Kuznetsov reminded that Russia’s new law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights” was recently passed on first reading by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.
“We hope this law will move forward with a second and third reading very quickly. It will provide the basis for regulating this area, which we consider very important,” emphasized the Sber executive.
Russia set to regulate its crypto market by the summer
The bill, which is part of a legislative package introducing comprehensive rules for the Russian crypto space, overcame its first parliamentary hurdle in April, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
It aims to legalize the circulation of digital assets, including decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and fiat-pegged stablecoins, in the Russian economy.
It should also widen access to include non-qualified investors, although a $4,000 annual limit for the latter, who will be able to buy only the most liquid cryptos, as well as the expected reduction of authorized exchange services are likely to result in the opposite.
Under the legislation, which must be adopted and enforced no later than July 1, 2026, both private individuals and legal entities will be able to legally purchase coins only through approved intermediaries.
This includes traditional banks, brokers, stock exchanges, and trustees, which will be allowed to work with cryptocurrencies under their existing licenses, as well as dedicated crypto platforms registered with the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), including exchanges and depositories.
Russia’s financial watchdog, Rosfinmonitoring, recently described crypto exchanges as a weak link in the country’s financial infrastructure, often used for money laundering, recalled the business news portal RBC, which also relayed Kuznetsov’s comments.
The government agency backed the adoption of strict regulations for the digital-asset trading platforms, similar to those that are in place for banking institutions.
The legal framework that’s currently under review is based on a regulatory concept announced by the Bank of Russia in late December 2025.
It has been criticized for being overly restrictive by both lawmakers and bankers, who already made proposals tailored to liberalize the draft law.
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It’s only rational to protect the balance sheet when capital gets expensive, regulatory postures harden overnight, and geopolitical shocks start tearing through markets in hours instead of weeks. Companies pause new initiatives and wait for a signal that the environment is safe again.
I’ve sat in enough quarterly business reviews to know that “we’ll revisit this when the market stabilizes” is practically a reflex for most decision-makers. But if you examine the operational history of crypto infrastructure rather than fixating on price charts, you start to notice something counterintuitive. The products that define the next cycle are almost never built during the euphoria phase, they’re built in the quiet that precedes it.
The Counter-Cyclical Foundation of Category-Defining Products
At ChangeNOW, my team has noticed something consistent, the moments when the market contracts most brutally are almost always the ones where the infrastructure that ends up mattering gets built. Projects running on narrative and hype disappear, and the teams left standing are the ones genuinely solving engineering problems. At the same time, user acquisition costs collapse across every channel, paid, organic, partnerships, because nobody is fighting for attention anymore.
But the most important change is on the client side. The users who stick around aren’t just looking, they’re auditing and they stop spreading volume across five providers and start consolidating around the one or two that can actually prove they’re reliable.
DeFi tends to get held up as the textbook example, but the details actually matter more than the headline. In 2018, the ICO market froze, total market cap collapsed over 80%, and regulators across the US, China, and South Korea were rolling out coordinated enforcement. By any ordinary measure, it was a terrible time to build anything. We launched ChangeNOW the year before and had no intention of letting a market crisis slow us down. Yet Uniswap deployed its mainnet contract in November of that year, Compound went live that September, and Aave was finishing its pivot from ETHLend in that same stretch.
Nobody was following a narrative because there simply wasn’t one. They were working through unglamorous, specific problems: how to algorithmically price liquidity without an order book, how to manage collateral ratios programmatically, and how to settle cross-asset swaps without a central clearing counterparty. When risk appetite returned in 2020, those protocols had no need to introduce themselves.
Trust Ruptures Are Structural, Not Cyclical
The collapse of FTX in November 2022 was not simply a financial loss event. It was a rupture in the operational assumption that a centralized custodian could be treated as a neutral utility. When institutional and retail clients discovered that their assets had been treated as an unsecured liability on a proprietary trading desk’s balance sheet, the damage extended far beyond the immediate counterparties. It contaminated the risk assessment framework for every centralized intermediary.
Market data confirms that this was not a short-term emotional spike. More and more users refused to give up control of their keys.Hardware wallet providers didn’t need quarterly reports to know something had changed: between June 2022 and February 2023, our partner Ledger sold 1 million devices. The same urgency appeared on-chain. Exchange-to-wallet flows spiked right after FTX, and again in March 2023 when hourly CEX outflows reached $1.2 billion. By 2025 these weren’t one-off reactions. Non-custodial wallets were the default for 59% of users globally, and self-custody awareness had climbed to 71%.
The non-custodial wallet market itself reached $1.38 billion in 2025, with nearly 68% of cryptocurrency users preferring self-custody solutions and 61% of DeFi participants relying on non-custodial wallets to interact with blockchain platforms DEX spot volume as a share of total spot volume went from about 6% in 2021 to 21.2% by the close of 2025, and derivatives followed a comparable trajectory from 2.1% to 11.7%.
Zoom out far enough and something becomes hard to miss. Crypto’s major crises have a track record of producing entire new categories of infrastructure, not just cleaning up the old ones. The Mt. Gox collapse in 2014 gave the industry regulated exchanges with proof-of-reserves and on-chain audit trails. The ICO bust of 2018 gave it DeFi and composable liquidity protocols. Now, in the aftermath of FTX and the banking scares of 2022–2023, what’s taking shape is a wave of non-custodial wallets, DEX aggregators, and privacy-preserving compliance tools.
So crises don’t suppress innovation in crypto infrastructure; they reroute it directly into the vulnerabilities the preceding bull market chose to ignore.
What Wins in Prolonged Instability
Based on the demand patterns my team tracks across our partner base, like wallets, payment gateways, neobanks, institutional trading desks, I would isolate five categories that absorb volume when the market contracts.
Non-custodial settlement tools.
This is the most direct response to the trust rupture described above. Swap services, payment processors, and wallet infrastructure that never hold user funds on their own balance sheet remove the custodian risk from the equation. In a market where the question “who holds the keys?” has become a formal part of procurement checklists, non-custodial architecture shifts from a differentiator to a baseline requirement.
Infrastructure APIs and embedded finance rails.
Traditional fintech companies and brokers that spent 2021-2022 exploring crypto are now executing. The economics rule out proprietary blockchain stacks. Instead, the work revolves around integrating APIs: liquidity aggregation, cross-chain settlement, fiat on/off-ramps. The value here is abstraction: hiding the complexity of route optimization, gas management, and chain reorgs behind a single endpoint that behaves like a conventional payment rail.
Payment solutions for volatile economies.
This is a category that grows inversely with the stability of local fiat currencies and capital control regimes. When individuals and businesses in Argentina, Turkey, or Nigeria face accelerating devaluation, crypto ceases to be a speculative asset and becomes a liquidity preservation tool. The infrastructure that serves this demand, fast swap execution, local payment method integration, stablecoin access, operates on fundamentals that are decoupled from broader crypto market sentiment.
Privacy and control-oriented tools.
The experience of having funds frozen, withdrawn, or haircut on a centralized platform has a lasting behavioral effect. Users who previously accepted custodial convenience as the default begin to value key sovereignty, transaction privacy, and data autonomy. This is not a niche ideological preference; it is a rational risk response that persists long after the precipitating event.
Compliance infrastructure that does not break the user experience.
Across every major jurisdiction, AML, KYT, sanctions screening, and travel rule requirements are hardening, there is no ambiguity about where the regulatory trajectory points. The real differentiator is whether compliance infrastructure can be built without breaking the user experience. The providers that win are those that can execute these checks without introducing latency that destroys conversion or creates settlement risk for time-sensitive operations. In my team’s audits of partner swap receipts from competing providers, we have repeatedly found that AML holds were being used as a cover for spread expansion, a hidden “compliance tax” that the provider embeds into the rate. A professional infrastructure must execute compliance as an operational function, not a margin lever.
The Infrastructure Already Exists
On the surface, the building blocks look straightforward – swap, payment flow, on-ramp. Underneath, each one demands years of engineering and carries a serious risk of failure. The difficulty lives in the details product teams rarely discuss, things like liquidity is scattered across dozens of chains, routing cannot ignore MEV, gas tokens need managing across L1s and L2s, AML screening must track ever-changing global sanctions lists, and settlement has to work across asynchronous networks. None of these problems improve the end product, they are simply the cost of being in the game.
The market has matured to the point where this infrastructure is available as a service. For a wallet, a brokerage, or a payment company launching a crypto feature, the build-or-buy decision should be resolved in favor of buy unless the core business is infrastructure provision itself. The lead time compresses from years to weeks. The operational risk shifts from the product team to the infrastructure provider, who is contractually bound to uptime, rate integrity, and settlement finality. In my experience, the teams that internalize this reality early capture the window of opportunity that a bear market creates. The ones that insist on building from scratch typically ship too late to matter.
At ChangeNOW, our B2B infrastructure is designed for exactly this environment. We provide API access to liquidity across 1,500+ crypto assets, a guaranteed 99.99% uptime architecture, and a settlement model in which the amount shown on the confirmation screen is the amount that arrives on-chain, no hidden spread manipulation, no compliance tax embedded in the rate, no post-execution deductions labeled as “network adjustments.” We have operated through multiple cycles, and our commercial architecture reflects the lessons of each: transparency as a contractual obligation, not a marketing claim.
For teams building wallets, exchanges, payment gateways, or any product that requires reliable cross-chain swap execution, we have opened a Fast-Track program that compresses integration from first contact to production deployment. If your roadmap includes a crypto feature that cannot afford to launch late, I would suggest we talk now, while the market is still quiet. The products that ship in this environment are the ones that lead in the next. Everything else is just preparation for a cycle that has already passed.

Crypto social media has raised the issue of DeFi vulnerabilities to AI agents. The chief concern is that AI agents are much better at discovering exploit loops, thus putting even solid and large DeFi protocols in danger.
According to Manuel Araoz, all of DeFi is more vulnerable to exploits, mostly due to the use of AI analysis. Araoz, who is the founder of Open Zeppelin, warned that AI is a constant threat to decentralized projects.
PSA: I now consider *all* of DeFi unsafe.
Coding agents are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities, and smart contract security is too asymmetric: defenders need to fix every bug while attackers need just one exploit to steal funds.
— Manuel Aráoz (@maraoz) May 26, 2026
He has warned against using even the most established DeFi protocols like Aave, Sky Protocol, and Compound. For now, some investors consider those protocols reasonably safe, but there are still warnings on setting up timelocks and avoiding permissionless operations.
The warning arrives after crypto hacks reached record levels in April, and started to undermine trust in smaller DeFi protocols. However, blue-chip projects still host multiple vaults with their own risk levels.
DeFi lost around $285M in attacks attributed to DPRK hackers, and another $437.4M from unidentified threat actors, according to Dune Analytics data. Most of the hacks in 2026 were linked to a bridge verification flaw, followed by social engineering.
Is AI creating a wave of hacks?
The warning that AI may exploit DeFi protocols is spreading on crypto social media. The chief fear is that multiple projects may still run vulnerable smart contracts, despite years of audits.
However, according to other analysts, AI may not be that powerful in exploiting flawed contract logic. Instead, exploits always depend on a human element, such as errors in signing transactions or access to exposed private keys.
The recent exploits also showed some DeFi protocols had a centralized element that allowed threat actors to take control.
The founder of Slow Mist warned the recent attacks were a mix of logic hacking and social engineering. He called to DeFi teams to use AI themselves and simulate attacks and exploits, calling for at least one attack drill each quarter.
DeFi hacks slowed down again in May
After almost daily attacks in April, hacks slowed down in May, returning to a low baseline. In May to date, only around $44M were taken in various hacks, as only smaller protocols were attacked.
In May, hacks against DeFi protocols returned to baseline, after the record of KelpDAO in April. | Source: DeFiLlama.
In May, around 14 attacks were reported, of which the most serious one affected ThorChain. For now, lending protocols are still functioning, though open to the same exploits with flash loans and potential bridging risks.
DeFi suffered a hit from April’s exploits, in combination with weakening ETH prices. As a result, DeFi protocols now hold around $81B, down from over $98B in April. The current TVL levels only reflect nominal prices, and in fact more assets are locked in DeFi as a source of passive income.
Aave, the leading protocol, still holds around $14B, not yet recovered from the withdrawals in April. As Cryptopolitan reported, the KepDAO exploit was also a major blow to trust in DeFi.
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On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post said that it is “critically important” that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) keep “exclusive authority” over prediction market platforms. This is coming at a time when platforms like Polymarket, Kalshi, Robinhood and Crypto.com are coming under fire by regulators across the U.S.
The CFTC is currently in active litigation against five states (Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, and New York) that tried to shut down prediction markets under state gambling laws. A coalition of 39 attorneys general, led by Nevada’s Aaron Ford and Ohio’s Dave Yost, has lined up behind Massachusetts in its parallel fight to block Kalshi’s sports contracts, arguing that Congress never meant to override centuries of state authority over gambling when it wrote the Commodity Exchange Act. Last week, we also saw Minnesota becoming the first state to criminalize prediction markets, with Governor Tim Walz signing a bill that imposes felony penalties for operating them.
The main legal question at the heart of all of this is whether sports and entertainment contracts are derivatives or repackaged as some sort of glorified gambling products. That said, Trump named Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker as the officials trying to break the federal framework, calling them “SCUM” and framing state pushback as a competitive risk against foreign rivals. “Other Countries are after this new form of Financial Market, and we want to remain at the top,” he wrote. For an industry that has spent two years operating in legal grey zones, that level of presidential air cover is a first.
What Trump Actually Said and Why It Matters Now
The post praises newly appointed CFTC chair Michael Selig, who is the only active commissioner in what is meant to be a five-person panel. Selig was appointed in December last year and has spent his first few months suing multiple states. The post clearly indicates that President Trump is giving a go ahead for Selig to continue pushing federal preemption as hard as he can.
Another angle to this story is the fact that the president has a direct family and business stake in which the regulator wins the fight. Last October, Trump Media made an announcement that they were entering the prediction market sector via Truth Predict, a platform built into Truth Social through an exclusive arrangement with Crypto.com Derivatives North America, a CFTC-registered exchange.
The Five-State Lawsuit Front and the 38-AG Counterpunch
Since April, the CFTC has sued Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, arguing that event contracts traded on Designated Contract Markets fall under the Commodity Exchange Act and that states cannot enforce gambling laws against them. Arizona’s criminal case against Kalshi was already paused by a judge who said the federal preemption argument was likely to win. Wisconsin’s lawsuit targets Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com, Robinhood and Coinbase for alleged felony violations of state gambling law.
The state response has been just as aggressive. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and Ohio AG Dave Yost authored an amicus brief, joined by 37 other attorneys general, backing Massachusetts in its fight to keep Kalshi’s sports contracts out of the state. The coalition flagged that more than $1 billion was wagered across 3.4 million Kalshi sports bets between January and June 2025, roughly 90% of it tied to sports outcomes. Their argument is straightforward: Congress never explicitly overrode state gambling authority, and the CFTC cannot invent that override out of a statute that doesn’t even mention gambling.
What Happens Next
Court watchers expect this to land at the Supreme Court within the next 12 to 18 months. Until then, prediction market platforms keep operating across most of the country with federal cover, while states like Minnesota actively criminalize them. Congressional pressure is also building, with the House Oversight Committee opening an investigation into Kalshi and Polymarket over insider trading concerns. Trump’s endorsement makes the federal position politically harder to walk back, but it does nothing to settle the underlying legal question.
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India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is examining the consent and data collection practices of startups that record home-service workers and sell the footage to robotics labs. The probe comes weeks after Human Archive, a startup founded by four UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers, announced $8.2 million in seed funding to scale exactly that kind of operation across India.
The leading organizations in the funding round included Wing Venture Capital and NVP Capital, along with Y Combinator, and angel investors from companies such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, and Meta.
The money funds camera-equipped headsets and custom sensor hardware deployed with gig workers who clean homes, cook in cloud kitchens, and staff hotels. Robotics labs that are training machines to perform physical tasks will buy the resulting footage.
According to CEO Raj Patel, the firm is running over a thousand headsets in various parts of India, and is developing gloves, motion capture suits, and wrist cameras to complement its video feeds.
Human Archive pays workers $1 per hour. Rival firms pay between $2.63 and $4.20, according to ET. According to Patel, the gap reflects lower overhead from operating directly in India.
Workers do not know where the footage goes
Workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review said none knew how recordings would be stored, shared, or used by the robotics companies purchasing them.
“It is important that if workers are engaging in this, that they are informed by the companies themselves of the intention … where this kind of technology might go and how that might affect them longer term,” said Yasmine Kotturi, a professor of human-centered computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Human Archive said its contracts comply with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, that it displays a privacy notice with consent details, and that all footage is anonymized with faces blurred.
The DPDP Act is still in its early stages of enforcement. The ministry’s review could set a precedent for how regulators treat video data collected from workers and the homes they enter.
The argument that made India’s IT ministry pay attention
Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal posted on X that his company would not participate in data collection from workers. Patel fired back that Urban Company would “soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing relevance.”
Co-founder Rushil Agarwal posted that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana had “laughed at him and called him stupid” when he pitched the idea.
Pronto confirmed early discussions before walking away.
According to reports, Pronto conducted separate tests for opt-in recording while performing household chores. The evaluation conducted by the IT Ministry came after media coverage of the pilot and the ongoing debate about which firms should be allowed to record in Indian households.
As Cryptopolitan reported in February, India positioned itself at the 2026 AI Summit as the leader of a Global South push to shape AI policy.
The government’s willingness to investigate a Y Combinator-backed startup within weeks of its funding announcement signals that the push extends to policing how foreign-backed companies collect data from Indian workers.
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TeraWulf is making a much bigger bet on artificial intelligence infrastructure. However, it is not about chips anymore. It is about power. The company secured a 285-acre site in eastern Kentucky. It is expected to support more than 1 gigawatt (GW) of AI and high-performance computing capacity.
After the announcement, TeraWulf shares climbed 10.3% in the latest trading session. It traded at $25.18 at the press time. The new site, called the Muskie Data Campus, places TeraWulf among a growing list of firms racing to lock down massive electricity access.
AI’s Next Big Battle Is Over Electricity
AI-linked stocks extended their rally. Investors went on to buy Bitcoin miners linked stocks amid the emerging data centers and AI infrastructure trend. Hut 8 jumped by more than 6%, Keel gained 6.5%. Meanwhile, Micron surged by almost 20% to record highs after UBS raised its target. AMD also added another 5%.
The global crypto market took a dump. Its cumulative market cap dipped by around 2% to hit $2.54 trillion. Bitcoin price trailed back to the $75,000 levels while Ether hovers around $2,100.
A 1 GW AI campus is now considered hyperscale infrastructure. Sites of this size can reportedly support millions of advanced AI chips and large training clusters for next-generation AI models. It exceeds many traditional cloud campuses built over the last decade.
Investors have treated semiconductors as the primary bottleneck for AI growth over the years. That narrative is now changing quickly. Access to electricity, transmission infrastructure, and utility approvals is becoming the real constraint.
The Kentucky project fits directly into that trend. According to reports, Microsoft previously partnered with Constellation Energy around the Three Mile Island restart. It was tied to around 800 MW of projected capacity. Meanwhile, Amazon and Talen Energy have targeted some 2 GW of dedicated power capacity for AI data center operations.
TeraWulf’s AI Pivot Is Starting to Pay Off
The International Energy Agency estimates global data center electricity consumption could nearly double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. This is largely driven by AI workloads. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects that global data center power demand could rise roughly 50% by 2027. It added that it can potentially surge by 165% by 2030.
It is expected that the data centers currently consume around 4% to 5% of national electricity usage in the US. It is projected that this figure could hit 9% by the end of the decade.
Kentucky Power is reportedly building a 345-kV substation linked to a 765-kV transmission network. It would be capable of handling industrial-scale electricity demand. However, TeraWulf has already secured transmission and energy service agreements tied to the project. The rollout is expected to happen in phases.
The company plans to bring the first 500 MW online during the second half of 2028. Another 500 MW could be out by the second half of 2030.
TeraWulf already operates another 480 MW facility in the state. This means that Kentucky now hosts multiple large-scale AI and high-performance computing campuses.
TeraWulf originally built its business around Bitcoin mining. However, it has pivoted toward AI and HPC hosting. The transition is already showing up in financial results. It reported around $34 million in Q1 2026 revenue. It mentioned that $21 million of the revenue came from HPC leasing activities.
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Is Elon Musk really planning to put SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) under one roof? It’s all anyone’s talking about on Wall Street, in executive offices, regarding AI expenditure, rockets, and some strange family tree of businesses.
SpaceX is getting ready for a Nasdaq listing in a little over two weeks, after hitting a private value of $1.25 trillion earlier this year through its merger with xAI. Tesla is already worth about $1.6 trillion.
The merger talk did not come out of nowhere, because allegedly, Elon has already spoken with colleagues about combining the companies.
One current Tesla employee reportedly told CNBC that many workers inside the EV company have expected this kind of deal for years, and that staff talk about it openly.
Tesla and SpaceX already share boards, engineers, cash, batteries, trucks, and AI infrastructure
Relationships between Tesla and SpaceX have many different aspects and are quite strong. Elon Musk serves on the boards of both firms. Another individual, who is a board member for both, is Ira Ehrenpreis, who founded DBL Partners. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother, is currently on the Tesla board and was previously a SpaceX director. Additionally, Antonio Gracias and Steve Jurvetson were board members of Tesla before switching their allegiance to SpaceX.
Staff relationships are rather evident too. For example, Charles Kuehmann is vice president of materials engineering for both companies. He moved from Apple ten years ago. Since then, he works on solving engineering challenges in large-scale hardware projects. This type of job is relevant because material science, heat exchange, weights, battery safety, manufacturing pressures, and hard engineering problems cannot be overcome with an inspiring speech.
Financial relations between SpaceX and Tesla cannot be denied either. In January, Tesla said that it had invested $2 billion in xAI, Elon’s artificial intelligence company. One month later, SpaceX and xAI merged, thus making Tesla’s investment in xAI stock linked to SpaceX. Therefore, Tesla established financial connection with SpaceX before any stock market listing.
SpaceX also buys a lot from Tesla. According to its prospectus, in 2024 and 2025, the company plans to spend $697 million to buy Tesla Megapack batteries, which will power the data centers owned and operated by xAI around its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. This is not merely an internal order but hundreds of millions worth of battery hardware for AI compute capacity.
According to the prospectus, SpaceX will also spend $131 million in purchasing Tesla Cybertrucks at listed retail prices.
Lawyers said a Tesla-SpaceX merger would probably not create a big antitrust fight because the companies do not mainly sell the same thing. Shareholders would have questions: Which company becomes the parent? What exchange ratio would investors get? Who decides the correct value for each side? Those are not small details when one company is valued at $1.25 trillion and the other is worth around $1.6 trillion.
For SpaceX, Elon controls about 85% of the voting power there, so he controls every major company decision.
SpaceX receives billions in military funding from Trump administration
In an attempt to create a secure military satellite network, the United States Space Force provided SpaceX with a $2.29 billion deal to develop an architecture known as the Space Data Network Backbone (SDN Backbone).
This new architecture will interconnect military sensors, missile-warning systems, tracking capabilities, and weapon delivery platforms. The plan is to allow fast, secure, and high-capacity data transfer between platforms and sensors with minimal latency. The space force hopes for a prototype of the architecture by 2027.
The SDN Backbone project has connections to missile defense projects that have been developed under the Golden Dome project from the Trump administration. The network is aimed at making sure that the data gathered from the missile warning and tracking sensors are relayed to interceptors in near real time.
Cryptopolitan earlier reported that Elon Musk will get $1 trillion if he achieves certain things at SpaceX. These things are; attaining market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and settling more than 1 million humans on Mars.
Similarly, Tesla has a large pay plan for Elon Musk, which is composed of 12 stages depending on market cap and operational achievements.
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Europe is getting ready to shut American satellite companies out of the majority of a key wireless frequency band, handing most of it to homegrown operators in what would be the bloc’s most significant space policy decision to date.
The European Commission is finalising a plan to set aside two-thirds of the 2 GHz mobile satellite band for European companies, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke to Reuters on Tuesday.
Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper would only be allowed to compete for what remains, one third of the total. A formal announcement was expected at a commissioners’ meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, though one source warned the details could still shift.
The band, a 30 MHz pair running between 1980-2010 MHz and 2170-2200 MHz, is what lets mobile phones and vehicles stay connected where regular networks do not reach.
The licences covering it were issued in 2009 to Inmarsat, now part of Viasat, and Solaris, now EchoStar, and both expire in May 2027. Because EU member states manage this band collectively through the Commission, a single bloc-wide decision on what comes next is possible.
Europe’s IRIS2 stands to gain the most
The main winner under the proposal would be IRIS2, Europe’s 290-satellite constellation built by the SpaceRISE consortium of SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat, with Airbus, Thales Alenia Space and OHB as contractors.
A 12-year contract was signed in December 2024 at around €10.5 billion, with roughly €6.5 billion coming from public money. Government services are expected to go live in 2030. British and Norwegian companies would also be eligible to bid.
The decision reflects Europe’s growing unease about relying on American technology for critical infrastructure. Musk’s threats to cut Starlink access in Ukraine sharpened that concern, as did his closeness with Donald Trump’s administration. Brussels has been tightening access for US companies across sensitive sectors from cloud services and chip equipment to cybersecurity tools, and satellite communications now appears on the same list.
Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said on Tuesday that EU-wide satellite connectivity had become “synonymous with resilience, security, and capability” given the current geopolitical climate. “Satellite connectivity is a key piece of our technological sovereignty, our security, and our defence, as also highlighted by IRIS2,” he said.
One commissioner pushed for a full lockout
The proposal was not without internal disagreement. One commissioner argued the entire band should go to European businesses with no outside access at all, putting them at odds with EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen, who opposed a full lockout. According to one source, Virkkunen was expected to prevail, which is how the two-thirds compromise landed.
The current licence holders, Viasat and EchoStar, face an uncomfortable position. Both are American-listed, meaning they would be treated as non-European bidders and pushed into the smaller open portion despite holding the licences today. Whether either could get around that through partnerships or restructuring is a question Wednesday’s announcement was unlikely to answer.
Starlink and Kuiper are not being removed from Europe entirely, but limiting them to one third of the only regulated band that mobile operators rely on for direct-to-device services puts a hard ceiling on how far they can grow on the continent. The Commission’s formal proposal was expected Wednesday afternoon, Brussels time.
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Honeywell-backed quantum computing firm Quantinuum announced terms for its US initial public offering on Tuesday. It is aiming for a valuation of around $12.7 billion. The company plans to sell shares between $45 and $50 each. However, it hopes to raise as much as $1.05 billion.
Quantinuum intends to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “QNT.” The proposed valuation turns out to be quite high from the the $10 billion valuation it received during its private funding round in September 2025. At that time, it managed to raise $600 million with investors. This included Nvidia’s NVentures, Quanta Computer, JPMorgan Chase, Mitsui, and Amgen.
Quantinuum bets big on Quantum IPO boom
If this IPO is successful, then this would make Quantinuum the first company focused solely on quantum computing to go public. However, IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum previously went public through SPAC mergers.
Just days before the IPO filing, Cryptopolitan reported that the Trump administration announced $2 billion in equity investments. This included the nine quantum computing firms.
According to reports, Quantinuum received a $100 million grant from this initiative. Meanwhile, France has also committed over $1 billion to its national quantum strategy,
This might come as a shock, but Quantinuum’s financials have revealed growing losses. The company reported $30.9 million in revenue for 2025. This marked a 35% increase from the last year. However, its net loss widened to $192.6 million from $144.1 million.
Over the first quarter of 2026, its Revenue dropped by 73% year over year to $5.2 million. Its net losses grew to $136.6 million from $30 million a year earlier. Almost three-quarters of Quantinuum’s 2025 revenue has come from US govt contracts and Japan’s RIKEN.
Quantum hype outruns revenue
The dependency of the company on govt funded project has flagged some concerns for investors. Quantinuum’s valuation suggests a price-to-sales ratio that exceeds 400 times its 2025 revenue. It is much higher than the estimate seen in past deep-tech IPOs.
Semiconductor designer Arm Holdings went public in 2023. It had a valuation of about 20 times trailing sales. Similarly, AI infrastructure company C3.ai debuted in 2020. It saw a valuation of around 40 times its forward revenue estimates.
This disparity indicates that investors view quantum computing differently from traditional tech sectors. They might be watching it as a long-term and strategic investment that focuses on anticipated breakthroughs rather than current earnings. Market analysis hints that the area has shifted from an experimental phase to early commercialization.
Quantinuum focuses on developing trapped-ion quantum computers. It uses electrically controlled ions as qubits. This strategy is different from the superconducting systems used by firms like IBM and Google.
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OpenAI’s founder and CEO Sam Altman sat before a massive crowd at a conference and said with a straight face that: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and then we’ll make people buy it from us on a meter.” Chilling, isn’t it?
Sam said OpenAI expects demand to keep rising as AI becomes harder to separate from serious work. “The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go like this. When can a CEO of a major company, a president of a major country, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, when can they not do their job without making heavy use of AI? This doesn’t mean that there will be an AI CEO or an AI president,” said Sam.
Sam Altman says leaders will use AI because one person cannot manage every detail alone
“We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water,” Sam added. He added that people would “buy it from us on a meter” and use it for whatever they want.
Sam believes the role of a human CEO is already changing because no single person can cover every corner of a big company. He said:
“You still do need a person to stand behind decisions and kind of exercise human judgment and all of the understanding that we expect out of someone running a an important organization to do. But the actual parts of my role that I will increasingly have to rely on an AI to do because no human can.”
Sam’s view is that top jobs will become more about watching AI systems, checking their work, choosing when to trust them, and giving them direction. The human stays in charge, but the job becomes less about doing every task and more about managing the machines doing the work.
Sam said this threshold may take “a little bit longer,” but “probably not a lot longer.”
Sam Altman says OpenAI’s tools already shape his own business decisions
Sam also said he is already leaning on OpenAI’s own agents and AI tools inside his daily job.
“It’s ramping incredibly quickly,” he said.
He said when he gets a new idea for a business model, a product, or a strategy change, he asks OpenAI’s tools before he speaks to another person about it.
Sam said the answers get better when the systems have more company context, like internal documents, communication, code, customer data, and other company information, as the kind of material that can improve AI output. (This is absolutely not a good idea.)
“As they can get close to full context of our company,” he said, “the quality of the answers gets better and better.”
During the interview, Sam referred to the recent reports surrounding OpenAI, which raised $110 billion through an investment round just two weeks prior to the discussion. Among others, Amazon, Nvidia, and Softbank participated in the fundraising.
He likened the fundraising to the public market and mentioned that the latter was four times smaller than the record-setting largest public offering ever made. It is worth noting that the public market deal was $25 billion raised by Saudi Aramco. Simply put, even though the public market should theoretically provide the largest amounts of money available, OpenAI raised more privately.
Then, the interviewer wanted to know how OpenAI would be spending that vast amount of money. Sam did not really answer that, though.
At another tech conference this week, Sam also admitted that some of his earlier job-market warnings were off. He had previously said AI could remove “entire classes” of jobs, especially as companies adopted the technology after ChatGPT launched in 2022.
“My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications,” Sam said during a conversation with Matt Comyn, CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia ($CBA.AX).
Matt’s conversation with Sam was summarized on Tuesday.
Sam said the near-term hit to entry-level white-collar jobs has not been as bad as he expected.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about that,” Sam said.
That is a major change from his older tone. In 2023, Sam told The Atlantic that jobs would “definitely” go away as companies used AI more widely. He also said better jobs would be created after that. Last year, at a Federal Reserve conference, Sam warned that “entire classes” of jobs would vanish.
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Europe is in danger of falling into a “dependency trap” in the global AI trade, according to a new report by Allianz. The continent currently maintains a heavy reliance on the United States and Asia for AI infrastructure and manufacturing.
The international race for AI supremacy is heating up, and Europe is falling short, according to a new report by the insurance group Allianz. Technological industries like cloud computing, semiconductors, and data centers are primed to reorganize the entire world economy. The analysis by Allianz argues that the United States and Asia lead the market share in these sectors, giving them great economic leverage over Europe going forward.
The continent is in a precarious position where it has become increasingly reliant on foreign cloud providers, chip manufacturing, and computing power. Allianz warns that this could reduce the economic sovereignty of Europe in the future AI-driven economy. Europe is at great risk of becoming a consumer of AI technologies, as opposed to a dominant producer.
Where things stand today
As of today, American firms control around 80% of Europe’s cloud compute market, 60% of enterprise software revenue, and nearly 40% of its operational computing capability. Almost half of Europe’s upcoming data center projects are also controlled by American tech firms.
The United States has also tripled imports tied to AI infrastructure investment since 2023, while Europe’s AI-related imports have risen roughly 40%. This disparity highlights how quickly the U.S. is scaling AI infrastructure relative to Europe.
While U.S. firms are leading in AI infrastructure, Asia dominates much of the hardware, manufacturing, and AI-related exports. Asia currently controls around 65% of global AI-related exports and hosts 7 of the 10 top AI exporters globally. This imbalance exposes another weakness for Europe, where slower infrastructure expansion is compounded by heavy dependence on Asian manufacturing and supply chains.
The bigger picture
The global economy is quickly developing into a new era where AI is a foundational strategic component for world powers. The countries that control the underlying infrastructure and manufacturing capacity may gain long-term economic leverage. The broader concern for Europe is that if it cannot build the domestic capacity to compete in this environment, it may never be able to catch up.
It is increasingly facing the risk of being squeezed between U.S. infrastructure leadership and Asia’s manufacturing dominance. This dependence on foreign AI infrastructure and manufacturing could expose Europe to long-term economic and strategic vulnerabilities. These include supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and external economic pressure. The Allianz report ultimately argues that Europe may need to drastically accelerate domestic AI investment to avoid falling into long-term technological dependence on foreign powers.
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Strategy used up as much as $1.38B from its cash reserves to buy back debt maturing in 2029. While the move is presented as improving the balance sheet, analysts are worried the company has a much shorter runway for dividend payments.
Strategy presented its 8-K filing a day late, outlining its debt retirement operations. In total, the debt retirement reached $1.5B, and the latest filing mentioned the use of cash reserves and BTC operations.
As Cryptopolitan reported earlier, Strategy skipped a week of BTC purchases after a week of no new STRC raises.
Strategy’s Executive Chairman, Michael Saylor, mentioned the company was seeking more flexibility in improving its balance.
These transactions demonstrate the optionality we have built into Strategy’s capital structure and our dynamic, multi-variate capital allocation model, said Saylor.
The debt maturing in 2029 was trading below par, meaning the company could achieve savings by retiring the bonds earlier. However, this led to depleted reserves. The company mentioned it plans new raises to refill its cash treasury.
How did Strategy change its balance?
Based on Strategy’s 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company retains a total of 843,738 BTC. So far, independent trackers have not noticed any outflows from the company’s main treasuries. However, not all of the company’s wallets are known and tracked.
The official filing stated that Strategy completed capital markets and BTC transactions during the week of May 11-25. The main focus of the transactions was a previously planned repurchase of $1.5B in aggregate principal for 0% convertible senior notes due in 2029.
After the completion of the transactions, Strategy now has $6.7B in aggregate convertible notes, $15.5B in outstanding preferred stock, and a remaining cash reserve of $871M.
Strategy pays out around $100M in STRC dividends, or an annual obligation of around $1.2B. The recent operations give Strategy a much shorter period of reliably covering STRC payouts.
Will lower cash reserves kill demand for STRC?
The big question for Strategy is whether it would be able to absorb more of the BTC buying pressure. Strategy’s cash reserves of around $2.25B could give its playbook more time to maneuver and wait for another BTC bull market.
In the new week, STRC demand was once again zero, with no new ATM sales. STRC traded in its suitable price range of $99-$101 for new issuance, but buyers were waiting on the sidelines.
MSTR’s common stock price was stagnant at $159.77, while the market was still uncertain about Strategy’s safety margin.
A deeper BTC correction may mean that Strategy will be faced with the need to sell BTC. The leading coin fell to $75,731.70 as of May 26, just below Strategy’s average purchase price.
The coming week will show if Strategy uses its MSTR ATM sales again to raise cash and extend its grace period. The company still has to service significant debt, while struggling with MSTR dilution and lowered demand for STRC.
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The combination of an age-old UFO enigma in America with the crypto world has led to the holding of Bitcoins in Roswell, the capital of New Mexico, USA.
In this regard, on-chain analytics company Arkham Intelligence has drawn attention to the entity that apparently holds 0.173 BTC, worth $13,312.52. The timing and location of the event seem to have sparked discussions suggesting that aliens might be quietly collecting their Bitcoin hoard.
Roswell’s UFO legacy revisited through Bitcoin
Roswell became a global interest in 1947 when the United States Air Force issued a report stating that they found a “flying disc” in the vicinity of Roswell. This report, issued on July 8, 1947, sparked rumors about the crash of an alien spacecraft.
The military later denied their claim, explaining that the object was merely a piece of a weather balloon. Decades of witness claims, secret documents, and mysterious metallic remains have kept the story of Roswell alive.
This has contributed to the city becoming a hotspot for UFO conspiracy theorists. In fact, the city’s very logo exploits this extraterrestrial background, something crypto fans cannot ignore, given recent Bitcoin transactions.
In the last year, Roswell has become the first U.S. municipality to officially establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve via donations. The very first seed contribution, deposited on April 29, 2025, included 3,050,323 satoshis, equaling 0.0305 BTC and valued at around $2,906.
ALIENS ARE BUYING BITCOIN
The city of Roswell, New Mexico was the site of a famous UFO crash in 1947. The US Army Air Force announced possession of a “flying disc”, believed by many to be an alien spacecraft.
Now, that same city holds $13.3K of BTC that it received as donations… pic.twitter.com/u2mn9rWL58
— Arkham (@arkham) May 26, 2026
Anonymous subsequent contributions increased the balance to 0.173 BTC. The donations appear as deposits from various Bitcoin addresses, including some associated with regular retail wallets and services like Robinhood.
The city’s Arkham profile features a customized avatar combining extraterrestrial imagery with the Roswell Cosmicon logo. The reception of the first contribution has been signed by the mayor pro tem, Juliana Halvorson, and Bitcoin enthusiast Guy Malone.
The Arkham dashboard shows that the reserve is maintained on the Bitcoin blockchain and that there have been no outflows. The chart showing the evolution of balances shows a continuous increase since mid-2025, indicating that the total current market value is driven by Bitcoin price growth, not the municipality’s purchases.
Roswell passes landmark 10-year HODL ordinance
According to reports, the management of Roswell’s Bitcoin is regulated by a very restrictive municipal ordinance that prohibits quick selling of these digital currencies. All Bitcoin donations have to be held for at least 10 years.
After the fund exceeds $1 million in value, the city can spend no more than 21 percent of the funds annually. Such spending can take place once every five years. Uses of the Bitcoin reserve are highly restricted to two purposes only—subsidizing the payment of elderly people’s water bills and financing disaster relief efforts.
The announcement has led to a great deal of discussion on crypto forums. The Arkham blog post presented a provocative question: “Is this the first BTC in the possession of extraterrestrials?”
This prompted a number of comments suggesting that the original visitors from 1947 might have returned and diversified into Bitcoin. Another interesting point to note is that the irony of a city known for covering up a weather balloon as aliens is now amassing Bitcoins under the table. CoinDelisi, a Turkish crypto analyst, found a way to spin the story into an amusing tale, pointing out that, even though these are donated coins, they’ve become memes in the crypto community.
Do UFOs – now officially termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – exist?
The Department of Defense created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 to research UAP in an evidence-based fashion. The first volume of AARO’s Historical Record Report, published in 2024, states that, over 80 years of investigation by various government bodies, there is no empirical evidence to support the theory of an extraterrestrial origin of any UAP incident or of the United States’ recovery and reverse engineering of alien spacecraft.
On February 21, 2026, President Donald Trump issued a directive ordering various government agencies to declassify any documents regarding UAP/UFOs and other matters related to extraterrestrials. In accordance with that directive, the Department of Defense (through the website war.gov/ufo) has published multiple batches of papers and videos (the first batch was released on May 8, 2026; the second on May 22, 2026).
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S&P 500 otrdien sasniedza jaunu rekordu, sasniedzot 7,539.8 sesijas laikā un izvirzot indeksu devītās nedēļas uzvaru sērijas virzienā, pirmo reizi kopš 2023. gada. Tehnoloģijas veica lielāko slodzi, jo, protams, Volstrīta atkal sāka pielūgt čipus pēc garās brīvdienas.
Nasdaq Composite sasniedza jaunu intraday rekordu, kamēr Dow Jones Industrial Average devās pretējā virzienā. S&P 500 pieauga par 0.5%, Nasdaq pievienoja 0.9%, bet Dow zaudēja 216 punktus jeb 0.4%. ASV tirgi pirmdien bija slēgti piemiņas dienas dēļ.

The 30-day liquidity index for XRP on Binance indicated on Tuesday that the digital asset’s liquidity has declined to its lowest level since January 2020. The 30D Liquidity Index for XRP on the crypto exchange has fallen to approximately 0.043.
The drop in XRP’s liquidity on Binance to its lowest in the last five years reflects a significant decrease in market depth and confidence in the virtual asset. The decline also shows that the liquidity of XRP available for trading has decreased compared to previous periods.
XRP’s low liquidity signals potential end to selling pressure
XRP Liquidity on Binance Falls to Its Lowest Level Since January 2020
“Liquidity at these low levels could make the market more sensitive to sudden price movements, as large orders may have a greater impact on price.” – By @ArabxChain
Link ⤵️https://t.co/ugoh9111zo pic.twitter.com/oMYPDDzvtV
— CryptoQuant.com (@cryptoquant_com) May 26, 2026
On-chain data showed that XRP’s liquidity index rose to elevated levels between 2022 and 2024, reaching 3 and 4 points. The high liquidity levels also coincided with increased trading activity and strong market volatility.
The 30D Liquidity Index for XRP on Binance has also declined sharply in recent months to its current low levels. The drop indicates weakening speculative interest in the digital asset and a reduction in new liquidity inflows into the market.
Source: CryptoQuant. XRP Binance 30D Liquidity Index.
Continued low liquidity at the current levels could also make the market more sensitive to sudden price fluctuations. Large market orders tend to have a significant impact on price due to a lack of market depth, as evidenced in periods of low liquidity, when price is more prone to sharp movements if trading volumes suddenly surge.
XRP’s low liquidity on Binance also reflects caution and anticipation among market participants amid lower market activity and declining selling pressure. The virtual asset has traded bearish for the past few weeks, but the latest liquidity crunch, close to zero on the world’s largest crypto exchange, suggests momentum may flip soon.
At the time of publication, XRP has plunged 1.04% in the past 24 hours to $1.34. The digital asset has also dropped by 1.67% over the past 7 days and by nearly 6% over the past 30 days.
Binance XRP reserves have also dropped to a 3-month low, down from roughly 3 billion when the asset was trading above $3 last year, to roughly 2.7 billion XRP. The drop in XRP reserves on the crypto exchange suggests there’s less immediate selling pressure.
CME prepares to launch 24/7 XRP futures trading
Crypto tracking platform XRPScan revealed on Monday that wallets tied to Chris Larsen, Ripple’s co-founder and present executive chairman, became active in the wake of his pledged donations in the midterm elections. Larsen has pledged $3.5 million in contributions to support New York Democrat Alex Bores, while he also plans to back Gavin Newsom’s anticipated 2028 presidential campaign. The firm found modest transactions registered under Larsen’s wallets, which prompted speculation among market participants.
On-chain data revealed that Larsen currently holds an estimated 2.58 billion XRP across eight addresses. The crypto official’s holdings are worth roughly $3.5 billion under the current XRP price of $1.34, making him among the digital asset’s largest individual holders.
Larsen’s XRP transactions are closely monitored due to historical correlations between transfers and price volatility. In January 2025, one of his wallets transferred more than $109 million in XRP to major exchanges, including Coinbase, Bybit, and Bitstamp, after being dormant for nearly 7 years. In July 2025, another Larsen-linked wallet transferred 50 million XRP worth roughly $175 million, with more than $140 million going to trading platforms. The transfer occurred while XRP approached its record high above $3.40.
There are also institutional developments adding a long-term structural shift to XRP’s price, with the CME Group preparing to launch 24/7 crypto futures trading on Friday, including XRP-linked derivatives. The new initiative will eliminate traditional trading-hour restrictions and is expected to improve the asset’s liquidity flow across weekends and global sessions. CME’s previously launched XRP futures products have already attracted institutional participation, and continuous trading could further increase activity by improving price discovery.
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The oil market finds itself in a terrible Catch-22 for the oil speculators; there is too much news and yet nowhere to go, especially the Strait of Hormuz that is controlled by one individual who definitely has too much power.
In any case, since Brent is the most reactive international benchmark regarding Middle East oil issues, it increased by 2.5% to reach $98.47 a barrel, following the threat of response from Iran’s IRGC concerning U.S. air strikes.
Subsequently, Brent increased by 4.1%, rising up to $100.11. WTI crude was last quoted at $93.91, a decline of 2.8% from the Friday price. However, this is an improvement when compared with the Monday figures. Oil prices dropped drastically on Monday due to the belief that a peace deal could be reached soon.
Iran is demanding payments for passing through Hormuz as traders shy away from oil trades
Cryptopolitan had earlier reported that Iran may want a permanent charge on ships using the Strait of Hormuz as part of any peace deal with the U.S. The idea would then put Iran and Oman in charge of the route and add what is being called an environmental fee or transit toll.
The pressure was mounting even before there were any mentions of the fees discussion. The U.S. Central Command referred to new attacks on Iran as defensive strikes on Tuesday.
On the other hand, Trump mentioned on the weekend that a deal seemed imminent after three months of warfare. The traders were seeing both news about the war and hope for peace at once. That is where you get blinking screens and no one wanting to look like a chump.
Dave Ernsberger, president of S&P Global Energy, said the mixed signals have left traders frozen. “People are afraid to take a position with so much mixed messaging going on about the status of negotiations,” Dave told CNBC. Dave also said:
“It’s an interesting question… as to whether the global markets, market participants, governments are going to be willing to allow for any kind of transit fee or toll in the first place. It’s the principle of freedom of maritime flow that’s really at stake here, and what kind of precedent it sets.”
Tankers stay scarce while Micron and Hyperliquid trades explode
Even if the Strait reopens under a deal, the oil flow is not snapping back like a light switch. Dave said:
“The reality is that very few crude tankers or product tankers get through at all. If it’s 10 vessels a day, you’d be lucky to see two of those being oil tankers.”
According to Dave, it could take about two months for the production of oil from Qatar, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia to be normalized. The shipping will take four quarters before going back to normal levels.
Away from crude, crypto traders had their own circus. Micron ($MU) crossed $1 trillion in market value Tuesday after its stock ripped higher. A Hyperliquid ($HYPE) trader was sitting on more than $6.2 million in floating profit from a leveraged Micron position built in just 20 days.
Wallet 0x577…95fd2 took a 3x long position on 22,188.647 MU contracts from May 6 until May 8 with an average cost of $575.25. With Micron (MU) soaring above $879 during intraday trading hours (+17%), that position is now worth at over $18.8 million.
On Stocktwits, Micron ($MU) is currently the top trending ticker, as retail sentiment stays bullish, while chatter cooled from high to normal over the past day.
Hyperliquid ($HYPE) also hit a new all-time high above $63, up more than 0.1% in 24 hours, and sentiment around HYPE is also extremely bullish, and social sentiment is extremely high. The token is up more than 144% this year, per data from CoinGecko.
On May 22, before the three-day market closure, President Trump said, “Micron is great,” and said the company could invest “over $100 billion” in New York.
When markets reopened Tuesday, Micron ($MU) jumped 19% and added about $150 billion in market cap in one day. Its value has gone from $70 billion to $1 trillion in 12 months, a gain of about $930 billion.
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The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is doubling down on privacy and security tooling even as critics demand the organization do more to support ETH’s price, which has dropped nearly 60% against Bitcoin over five years.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, on May 26, promoted Kohaku, a privacy-focused initiative housed inside the EF, calling for security and privacy to become “normal” on Ethereum’s access layer.
The endorsement comes days after Buterin published a lengthy defense of the foundation’s strategy, stating that it should remain a research body and not an ETH price support mechanism.
Buterin’s position is in sharp contrast with Aave founder Stani Kulechov, who on May 23 publicly committed to a 12-month “revenue-led protocol strategy.”
What did Vitalik say about Kohaku?
Buterin’s post on X highlighted work by EF contributors, who have spent close to a year building Kohaku. The project targets two properties at Ethereum’s access layer, which are security (including trustlessness) and privacy, which covers both read and write operations, according to Buterin’s post.
Kassandraeth, who identifies as part of the Kohaku Initiative inside the EF, wrote on May 25 that she wanted to “get a bit more public” about the work and address confusion around the project. “Best way to clarify things is to speak candidly and openly about what I’m working on day-to-day,” she wrote on X.
The Kohaku GitHub repository describes the project as “privacy-first tooling for the Ethereum ecosystem.” It includes libraries for the Railgun privacy protocol, privacy pools, a provider abstraction layer, and a post-quantum 4337 account implementation, according to the repository’s README. Several components are marked as works in progress.
Kohaku fits into a broader privacy roadmap Buterin has been building throughout 2026. Cryptopolitan has previously reported that Buterin named three active technical efforts in May: account abstraction paired with FOCIL (a forced inclusion list mechanism), a keyed nonces proposal (EIP-8250), and access-layer work including Kohaku.
EIP-8250 would replace Ethereum’s single sender nonce with a two-part system designed to prevent observers from linking transactions originating from the same account.
Why is the Ethereum Foundation under fire?
While the privacy push is being discussed, at least eight senior contributors have left EF or announced departures in 2026, with five of these exits coming in May alone.
Among the most recent are Carl Beek, who spent seven years at the foundation and played a role in the Beacon Chain launch, and Julian Ma, a cryptoeconomics researcher who served for four years, both of whom announced their departures on May 18, as Cryptopolitan reported.
Buterin responded on May 25 with a public statement calling the EF “one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes” rather than Ethereum’s central authority. He disclosed that the foundation holds roughly 0.16% of circulating ETH and said it plans to reduce token sales while narrowing its mission to what he called CROPS: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security.
The foundation has faced repeated pressure from ETH holders who have been frustrated by the token’s performance. ETH trades around $2,136, which is less than half its level last August and down sharply against Bitcoin over a multi-year window.
However, for Buterin, EF should not orient itself around price support, a position he reiterated in his May 25 post by stating that chasing throughput and speed would be “a route to mediocrity.”
Aave takes the opposite tack
Where Buterin distances the EF from revenue concerns, Kulechov is leaning into them. The Aave founder announced on May 23 that the lending protocol would pursue a revenue-led strategy over the next 12 months.
“Sustainable, consistent revenue is what proves that DeFi can evolve beyond pure token speculation into durable businesses backed by balance sheets,” Kulechov wrote on X, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
Aave generated $7.96 million in fees over the past seven days and holds over $14 billion in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data. Its V4 crossed $100 million in combined deposits and loans on May 22, with institutional lending ambitions expanding alongside plans to grow GHO, the protocol’s overcollateralized stablecoin.
The divergence between the two camps captures a live debate inside Ethereum’s community, with some leaning towards prioritizing philosophical commitments to privacy, decentralization, and censorship resistance, while others believe protocol-level revenue generation is what will sustain long-term adoption.
Buterin is betting on the former, while Kulechov is building for the latter.
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Strive (NASDAQ: ASST) has bought a fresh batch of 1,109 Bitcoins, according to the firm’s CEO earlier today, for approximately $85.4 million, bringing its total holdings to 16,500 BTC.
The company has now leapfrogged Coinbase and the selling Riot Platforms to become the seventh-largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holder.
Strive is climbing the rankings among the top 10 public Bitcoin treasury companies. Source: BitcoinTreasuries.net
Is Strive replacing Strategy as the top Bitcoin buyer?
Strive’s purchase took place in the same week that Strategy, the company that started the corporate Bitcoin accumulation trend and holds more than 843,000 BTC, paused its weekly purchases and redirected its resources toward retiring $1.5 billion in convertible debt due in 2029.
Strive’s CEO, Matt Cole, disclosed on X that the company paid an average of roughly $76,989 per coin for the latest batch of its Bitcoin purchases. The company has made 17 separate Bitcoin purchases since September 2025, when it held just 69 BTC. The value of its total holdings across all purchases now sits at $1.64 billion, with an overall average price of $99,617 per coin.
Strive has accumulated 16,500 BTC. Source: Strive Dashboard
When Strive completed its acquisition of Semler Scientific in January, it inherited roughly 12,798 Bitcoins and became the 11th-largest public corporate holder at the time. The company’s holdings have exploded since then through the use of a series of at-the-market programs tied to its Class A common stock and its Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, which trades under the ticker SATA.
Strive now ranks seventh among public companies on the BitcoinTreasuries.net leaderboard, just ahead of Coinbase (16,492 BTC) and Riot Platforms (15,680 BTC).
Coinbase only needs to buy eight coins to close the gap. Cryptopolitan reported that the gap with Riot, meanwhile, has widened after the company sold 3,778 Bitcoins in Q1 2026 for $289.5 million, citing rising energy costs. Riot’s treasury fell 18% to 15,680 BTC by the end of March.
How does Strive intend to keep pace with its dividend plan?
Strive facilitates its Bitcoin purchases through SATA because it pays a 13% annualized dividend and has no fixed maturity date. Cryptopolitan recently reported that the initial $149.3 million SATA offering in November 2025 funded Strive’s purchase of 1,567 BTC.
Strive disclosed in its latest SEC filing that it might refresh its ATM programs for both Class A shares and SATA stock, giving the company additional flexibility for future raises and purchases.
Cash and equivalents rose to $93.3 million from $87.3 million, and Strive holds over $50 million in Strategy’s STRC preferred stock.
Cole said in May that Strive had eliminated all its outstanding debt, be that short- or long-term. However, the company’s average acquisition cost of $99,617 per coin is well above the current spot price of roughly $77,000, meaning its total position carries an unrealized loss of approximately $373 million.
ASST shares have gained 133% over the past three months, outperforming other Bitcoin treasury companies. The stock closed at $18.21 on Friday and rose 3% in premarket trading on Monday alongside Bitcoin’s move back toward $77,000. On a one-year basis, however, ASST remains down more than 88% from its 2025 high.
Strive has planned a daily rollout of SATA dividends starting June 16 to fund more purchases.
Cole said the move would make Strive the first listed company to offer daily dividend payouts. Saylor called the model “impressive.”
However, Strategy still holds more than 50 times Strive’s stack, and commands a market capitalization many multiples larger. The firm’s BTC yield of 23.4% year-to-date and its amplification ratio of 45.2%, both disclosed by Cole, suggest the company is growing its per-share Bitcoin exposure at a pace that has caught Wall Street’s attention. Analysts reportedly now see a price target as high as $38 for ASST.
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