Today's top news highlights:
The People's Bank of China has added 12 new digital RMB business operators.
Circle launched a packaged Bitcoin token, cirBTC, backed by Bitcoin at a 1:1 ratio.
IMF: Tokenized finance may reshape the global financial system and introduce new systemic risks.
Binance Wallet will launch the Sentio Pre-TGE event on April 7th.
Regulation & Macro
The People's Bank of China has added 12 new digital RMB business operators.
The People's Bank of China announced the addition of CITIC Bank, China Everbright Bank, Huaxia Bank, China Minsheng Bank, Guangdong Development Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Zhejiang Commercial Bank, Ningbo Bank, Jiangsu Bank, Bank of Beijing, Bank of Nanjing, and Bank of Suzhou as operating institutions for digital RMB business, and they will be connected to the central bank's digital RMB system. The newly added institutions will commence digital RMB business after completing business and technical preparations.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Department of Justice have filed a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and the state's gaming regulators, alleging that the state has no authority to regulate prediction markets regulated by the CFTC. This lawsuit stems from Illinois' previous demands that Kalshi, Polymarket, and Crypto.com cease their operations, while the federal government argues that such event trading contracts are governed by federal derivatives laws, and that state intervention infringes on the CFTC's exclusive regulatory authority.
Coinbase has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish the Coinbase National Trust Company. Coinbase emphasizes that this approval does not involve becoming a commercial bank, accepting retail deposits, or engaging in fractional-reserve banking. Rather, it provides a unified federal regulatory framework for its long-standing custody and market infrastructure businesses. The company states that while retaining its New York State NYDFS BitLicense and state trust license, the OCC custody trust license will provide a compliance basis for developing new products such as payments.
European Central Bank (ECB) Executive Board member Piero Cipollone stated that the digital euro project is "moving well" and could be launched in July 2029. He noted sufficient consensus at the legislative level and increasing interest from banks in participating in the pilot program. The ECB plans to launch a 12-month pilot phase in the second half of 2027. Cipollone anticipates that if legislation is in place by the end of this year, the digital euro will be issued in July 2029, and he currently sees no major obstacles. ECB officials have previously expressed concerns about reliance on US payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard, as well as the US dollar-pegged stablecoin supported by Trump.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), in conjunction with the Department of Justice, has filed lawsuits against the states of Connecticut and Arizona, arguing that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets. The CFTC claims it "first formally recognized" event contracts in 1992 and that Congress has granted it sole regulatory authority over the market. Previously, betting regulators in these three states issued stop-loss orders to prediction platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, arguing that event contracts violated state gambling laws. The CFTC chairman stated that these states' "aggressive and excessive" overreach has led to market uncertainty. Currently, 11 states have taken legal action against prediction markets, and congressional lawmakers are pushing forward proposals to ban sports-related event contracts.
Trump appoints Todd Blanche, author of the crypto enforcement memo, as acting Attorney General.
US President Trump dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi and appointed his former personal lawyer, current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, as acting Attorney General. Blanche, who previously represented Trump in criminal cases in New York, ordered the disbandment of the Justice Department's National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team after taking office as Deputy Attorney General and signed a memorandum instructing prosecutors to cease pursuing regulatory violations in the crypto industry. According to disclosed documents, Blanche held various cryptocurrencies worth approximately $159,000 to $485,000 at the time of signing the enforcement memorandum, including Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano, Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot, Quant, and Coinbase stock, violating ethical guidelines and his previous promise to divest assets before dealing with crypto-related matters.
Kentucky has successfully blocked a de facto ban on Bitcoin self-custody; the anti-self-custody provisions were removed before the bill was sent to the governor for signature.
Project Updates
Safe, a non-custodial multisignature wallet provider, has launched Safenet, a decentralized transaction security network. SAFE holders can delegate their tokens to six independent validators (including Greenfield, Gnosis, Safe Labs, Rockaway, Blockchain Capital, and Core Contributors GmbH) to review proposed transactions according to preset security rules. Upon approval, the validators issue cryptographic proofs, which, along with the Safe Guard module, prevent the execution of unverified transactions. Each genesis validator must stake at least 3.5 million SAFE, marking SAFE's expansion from a governance token to a staking asset with economic uses. Specific staking rewards, penalties, and fee mechanisms are still pending a vote by SafeDAO.
The dYdX community funded the DAO by using 10 million USDC from its insurance fund.
The dYdX community has passed Proposal No. 372, agreeing to allocate 10 million USDC from the Insurance Fund to fund the DAOs, with 2.5 million allocated to Operations SubDAO, 5 million to Treasury SubDAO, and 2.5 million to the dYdX Foundation. The proposal received 66.34% participation, with 77.96% voting in favor based on account results. After the allocation, the Insurance Fund will retain approximately 7 million USDC as a protocol safety buffer.
SoFi has launched its "Big Business Banking" platform for businesses, integrating fiat currency accounts and crypto asset management into a single, regulated system. Operated by SoFi's nationwide licensed bank, the platform supports corporate deposits, 24/7 payment settlement, and liquidity management, covering fiat currency, the SoFiUSD stablecoin, and some cryptocurrencies. It also provides functions such as SoFiUSD minting and burning. Businesses can manage traditional and on-chain cash flows through a unified interface and access payment infrastructure via API. Initial partners include Galaxy, Wintermute, Fireblocks, BitGo, Cumberland, Bullish, B2C2, and Jupiter, with the underlying blockchain network being Solana.
Telegram's in-app wallet, Wallet in Telegram, has announced the launch of its Perpetuals perpetual contract feature, allowing users to open long and short positions directly within Telegram. This feature covers over 50 markets, including metals, stocks, crude oil, and cryptocurrencies, supporting leverage up to 50x and a minimum entry amount of $1. Powered by Lighter, the product displays real-time profit and loss, margin, and liquidation price, and allows users to set stop-loss and take-profit orders. The project team cautions that crypto investments carry a high level of risk, and service may be limited in some regions.
Coinbase's neutral internet payment protocol x402 will be migrated to the Linux Foundation and operated as an independent foundation, the "x402 Foundation." Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ant International, Base, Circle, Google, KakaoPay, Mastercard, Microsoft, Polygon Labs, Shopify, Solana Foundation, and Visa will join as new members in protocol governance. Named after the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, x402 is positioned as an open and neutral payment standard supporting crypto assets and traditional payment channels (credit cards, ACH, bank transfers, etc.), aiming to provide infrastructure for automated payment scenarios in the "proxy economy."
Polymarket integrates with Pyth Pro to provide real-time quotes for traditional assets.
Prediction market platform Polymarket has integrated Pyth Pro as its data source for traditional asset contracts, initially covering intraday price changes and closing prices for gold, silver, and major stock index ETFs. Pyth Pro provides price data directly from institutions such as Jump Trading, Jane Street, and Cboe via WebSocket. Polymarket samples and displays this data every second as real-time price curves and "price to beat" indicators for settling high-volume positions. This collaboration allows Polymarket to access institutional-grade market data for gold, silver, WTI crude oil, natural gas, and several US stocks (such as TSLA, COIN, and PLTR) through a single integration, without relying on traditional high-priced data providers. The platform plans to expand to include more asset and contract types in the future.
The AI model evaluation platform yupp.ai will officially shut down on April 15th. New registrations and chat logs have been discontinued; users can only view historical chat logs and download data as instructed. Yupp stated that since its launch last June, it has provided multi-model comparison and evaluation services to over 1.3 million users and numerous paid AI labs, but failed to achieve a sufficiently strong product-market fit. Furthermore, with the rapid improvement of model capabilities and the migration of user workflows to agent systems that connect to tools, memory, and external services, the importance of chat-based crowdsourced model evaluation has declined. Therefore, the company has decided to gradually cease operations.
Nikita Bier, product manager for X, stated that the platform is developing a new mechanism: if a user posts cryptocurrency-related content in their account history for the first time, it will trigger an automatic account lockout and identity verification process to combat phishing and fraudulent activities. She claims this move could reduce the motivation for such activities by 99%, especially given the continued prevalence of phishing emails.
Circle launched a packaged Bitcoin token, cirBTC, backed by Bitcoin at a 1:1 ratio.
Circle has launched cirBTC, a Bitcoin-wrapped token backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, designed to provide institutions with a "highly secure and neutral version of wrapped BTC." The token will initially be issued on the Ethereum mainnet and Circle's Arc Layer 1 platform, and will fully integrate with Circle's existing technology stack, including the Arc blockchain and the Circle Mint platform. Circle states that cirBTC is suitable for over-the-counter trading platforms, market makers, lending protocols, and other institutions that require a neutral, secure, and high-performance tokenized version of Bitcoin. Currently, several Bitcoin-wrapped tokens exist on the market, including cbBTC issued by long-term partner Coinbase, while the earliest wBTC saw some institutions reduce their exposure due to involvement with entities associated with Justin Sun.
Sonic Labs announced that approximately 32.69 million S tokens from the Q1 and Q2 airdrops remain unclaimed and will be burned on October 15, 2026 if not claimed by the deadline. Claiming the Q1 airdrop before April 18, 2026, will still incur a penalty; however, it can be claimed without penalty between April 18 and October 15. For the Q2 airdrop, claiming before May 24 will incur a penalty; however, it can be claimed without penalty between May 24 and October 15. Tokens not claimed by the deadline will be permanently burned.
Bitcoin mining company MARA is laying off approximately 15% of its workforce, affecting full-time employees and contractors across multiple departments. CEO Fred Thiel stated in an internal memo that this move is a strategic adjustment rather than a purely financial decision, as the company is transforming from a pure Bitcoin mining company into an energy and digital infrastructure company. Affected employees will receive one month of paid leave, 13 weeks of severance pay, and full compensation for any unused vacation time. MARA had previously partnered with Starwood and Exaion to convert approximately 1 GW of its Bitcoin mining infrastructure into AI computing power facilities. MARA recently sold 15,133 bitcoins for $1.1 billion to repay $1 billion in convertible bonds. The company projects a net loss of $1.3 billion by 2025.
NFT project Intergaze has announced its closure; users must withdraw their assets within 14 days.
The NFT project Intergaze announced on the X platform that it is gradually shutting down, and all users must withdraw their assets within 14 days. NFT holders' NFTs will be migrated to StargazeZone on Cosmos Hub in late May. Users need to register a Cosmos wallet before May 1 to be included in the migration.
The impact of the Drift protocol vulnerability continues to expand, with the number of affected protocols increasing from 11 yesterday to 20. Nine new protocols have been added: PiggyBank, Perena, Vectis, Valeo, Amp Pay, Loopscale, Prime Numbers Fi, Gauntlet, and Exponent. Regarding specific losses: Prime Numbers Fi is estimated to have lost over $10 million, Gauntlet approximately $6.4 million, Neutral Trade approximately $3.67 million, Elemental DeFi approximately $2.9 million, Reflect Money approximately $1.95 million, Vectis approximately $1.69 million, Ranger Finance approximately $919,000, Pyra approximately $551,000, and PiggyBank confirmed a loss of $106,000, which was fully reimbursed by its team. The protocols have taken appropriate measures: most have suspended minting, redemption, deposits, withdrawals, or related vault functions; Prime Numbers Fi is still under evaluation and has not yet announced any action; Vectis has not yet responded, but Ranger Finance has confirmed its risk exposure. Gauntlet has limited further supply and is coordinating with Drift. The data estimated by Chaos Labs provided a reference for this loss assessment.
Leap Wallet, a Cosmos ecosystem wallet, has announced that it and its associated products, including Compass Wallet, Leap WebApp, and Swapfast, will be officially shut down on May 28, 2026. Users must complete asset migration before this date. Leap Wallet is a non-custodial wallet; user assets are stored on the blockchain and can be accessed again by restoring the mnemonic phrase and importing into other compatible wallets such as Keplr, MetaMask, Phantom, or Rabby. If users have delegated ATOM to Leap's Cosmos Hub validators, they should re-delegate to other validators to continue earning staking rewards.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao announced on the X platform that his new book, *Freedom of Money*, will be officially released next week. The English and Traditional Chinese ebooks are currently available for pre-order, with the physical English book launching simultaneously next week. Other language versions will be released in the coming months. Zhao emphasized that all proceeds from the book's sales will be donated to charity, stating that he "did not publish the book to make money." A check of Amazon reveals the book's Chinese title as *Binance Life: A Memoir of Luck, Resilience, and Protecting Users*.
Drift Protocol announced on the X platform that it has identified key information related to the attack and sent on-chain messages to four Ethereum wallets holding the stolen funds, indicating its willingness to communicate via Blockscan chat. Drift will share further updates with the community after the third-party attribution is completed. Previously, it was reported yesterday that Drift suffered losses exceeding $285 million in the attack.
Decentralized email project Dmail Network will gradually cease all services starting May 15, 2026. Users must export their email content and apply to cancel their accounts before then; all data will be completely deleted afterward. Dmail stated that due to factors such as the high cost of decentralized infrastructure, the failure to establish a viable commercialization path, the lack of practical use cases for its token, and the loss of core team members, the project could not achieve healthy and sustainable operation. The team foresaw this outcome, similar to the transformations of projects like Lens and Friend.tech. Founded in 2021, Dmail was committed to providing privacy-preserving decentralized email services that were not controlled by a single entity.
Binance Wallet will launch the Sentio Pre-TGE event on April 7th.
Binance Wallet will be hosting the Sentio Pre-TGE event from 16:00 to 18:00 on April 7th. Eligible users can participate through the Alpha event page, which requires 15 points. The Pre-TGE event reward tokens have a lock-up period stipulated by the project team. During the lock-up period, the tokens cannot be traded, transferred, or used. The unlock time may not be announced in advance.
Investment and financing news
Tether is making a final push to raise funds at a $500 billion valuation and is urging investors to commit to a deal in the next two weeks.
SpaceX is poised to reach a valuation of $2 trillion, surpassing Meta and Tesla.
Sources familiar with the matter revealed that SpaceX has raised its target valuation for its initial public offering to over $2 trillion. The company and its advisors are disclosing this valuation target to potential investors in preparation for meetings in the coming weeks. At a $2 trillion valuation, SpaceX would surpass all companies in the S&P 500 except for Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Microsoft, and Amazon, and would also surpass two other members of the "Big Seven" of U.S. stocks—Meta and Tesla, Elon Musk's own company. Earlier today, it was reported that the Saudi Public Investment Fund was considering subscribing to $5 billion worth of shares in SpaceX's IPO.
Opinions & Analysis
In its latest report, Grayscale stated that the crypto market showed resilience in March, but still has a long way to go before a full recovery. Bitcoin's net return in March was only 1.81%, avoiding a six-month losing streak. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 perpetual futures contracts were the best-performing sector in March, rapidly growing from zero to record daily trading volume, with oil futures becoming a new liquidity hotspot. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 contracts accounted for 40% of the platform's trading activity. The SEC issued several rulings this month regarding the legal status of crypto assets as securities. Grayscale pointed out that the oil price shock triggered by the Iran war was a major factor affecting the crypto market, with oil prices rising 63% per barrel, raising inflation concerns and expectations of interest rate hikes in major economies.
IMF: Tokenized finance may reshape the global financial system and introduce new systemic risks.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that tokenized finance could fundamentally reshape the global financial system, while introducing new systemic risks due to its speed and automation. Tokenization shifts trust from traditional intermediaries to smart contracts and shared ledgers, enabling near-instant settlement and 24/7 market activity, but also eliminating the buffers found in traditional finance. Automatic margin calls, real-time settlement, and programmable fund flows could accelerate liquidity stresses during market volatility, and smart contract vulnerabilities could spread rapidly, affecting multiple participants. Currently, tokenized real-world assets amount to approximately $27.5 billion, with US Treasury products dominating (over $12 billion). The IMF emphasizes that the long-term impact of tokenization depends on risk management at both the technological and regulatory levels.
Monad co-founder Keone Hon released a protocol security self-checklist on the X platform, focusing on core issues such as management permissions, fund security, and multi-signature mechanism design. The checklist includes ten key points: identifying which administrator functions might lead to fund losses; ensuring all related operations have time locks; establishing a real-time monitoring mechanism; providing timely alerts when administrator functions are called; reviewing all privileged accounts and using multi-signature (k-of-n) structures whenever possible; defining signature threshold parameters; ensuring multi-signature signers use independent cold devices solely for signing operations and follow best practices (such as independently verifying transaction hashes); setting rate limits for withdrawals and avoiding control by the same multi-signature; ensuring employee devices have malware detection and management capabilities; and pre-setting extreme scenarios where multi-signature signers are compromised, reverse-engineering potential attack paths from the attacker's perspective, and optimizing system design accordingly to increase attack costs and complexity. According to previous reports, a week before suffering a $285 million hack, Drift Protocol changed its multisignature mechanism to "2/5" (1 old signer + 4 new signers) and did not set a timelock. The attackers then gained administrator privileges, forged CVT tokens, manipulated oracles, disabled security mechanisms, and transferred high-value assets from the liquidity pool.
Important data
Hyperliquid's market share in the perpetual contract market has climbed to nearly 6%, a significant increase from approximately 3.5% a year ago, with monthly trading volume approaching $200 billion. This growth occurred during a period of decline in overall exchange trading volume since its peak in August 2025, indicating that Hyperliquid is truly capturing market share. On-chain competitors such as dYdX and GMX have yet to reach Hyperliquid's level in terms of trading volume growth or product expansion. Hyperliquid's expansion into non-crypto assets such as oil is a significant part of its growth, and its 24/7 trading model eliminates the gap risk caused by traditional market opening time restrictions. If decentralized perpetual contract platforms can continue to expand liquidity and asset coverage, their reach will extend far beyond native crypto trading volume, reaching the multi-trillion-dollar traditional derivatives market.
In March, hedge funds withdrew from global stock markets at the fastest pace in 13 years.
In March, hedge funds sold off global stocks at their fastest pace in 13 years, and the second fastest pace since Goldman Sachs began collecting data in 2011. This move was primarily driven by increased short selling, highlighting concerns that the stock market could weaken further amid the ongoing conflict in Iran. The MSCI World Index fell 7.4% in March, its worst monthly performance since 2022, while the S&P 500 fell 5.1% over the same period.
A new wallet received 488,500 HYPE tokens from FalconX, worth $17.18 million.
A newly created wallet received 488,599 HYPE tokens from FalconX, worth $17.18 million.
Two wallets received 1,781 BTC from BitGo, worth nearly $119 million.
Two wallets received 1,781 BTC from BitGo, worth $118.92 million.
BlackRock's IBIT daily trading volume reaches $16-18 billion, approaching Binance's level.
BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, currently has a daily trading volume of $16 billion to $18 billion, comparable to Binance and twice that of Coinbase.
Riot Platforms sold 3,778 BTC in Q1, raising $289.5 million.
Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms released its unaudited production and operations update for the first quarter of 2026, disclosing that it mined 1,473 BTC in the quarter and sold 3,778 BTC at an average price of $76,626, generating net proceeds of $289.5 million. As of the end of the quarter, the company's total Bitcoin holdings decreased to 15,680 BTC. Previous analysis suggested that Riot Platforms' recent Bitcoin sales could further exacerbate the sell-off trend among listed Bitcoin mining companies. Another Bitcoin mining company, MARA Holdings, also disclosed that it sold approximately $1.1 billion worth of Bitcoin in March to repurchase convertible bonds at a discount. Recently, several listed Bitcoin mining companies have cumulatively sold more than 15,000 Bitcoins to balance operational and investment needs.
GoPlus: Adobe suspected of being attacked, 13 million user data leaked.
GoPlus issued a security alert, indicating that Adobe has been suspected of being attacked, resulting in the data breach of approximately 13 million users. Users may face risks such as phishing emails or phone calls impersonating Adobe customer service, support ticket information being used for targeted social engineering scams, and password brute-force attacks. Users are advised to enable two-factor authentication, change their passwords and avoid reusing them across multiple platforms, be wary of emails or phone calls claiming to be from Adobe, and remember the "four no's" of phishing prevention: do not click on unfamiliar links, do not install software from unknown sources, do not sign unknown transactions, and do not transfer money to unverified addresses.
The whale "pension-usdt.eth" currently holds over $100 million in short positions in BTC and ETH.
The whale "pension-usdt.eth" has opened another 3x leveraged short position in ETH, worth approximately $41 million. Currently, he holds two large short positions in BTC and ETH, with a total value of approximately $107.5 million.
In February 2026, stablecoin monthly trading volume reached $7.2 trillion, surpassing the $6.8 trillion of the US Automated Clearing House (ACH) network for the first time. Artemis data shows that stablecoins are becoming the infrastructure for global payments: "no banks, no weekends, no borders." Stablecoin trading volume continued to reach new highs in March, reaching $7.5 trillion. In the first quarter of 2026, the total supply of stablecoins reached $315 billion, accounting for 75% of the total cryptocurrency trading volume. Standard Chartered analysts predict that the total market capitalization of stablecoins will reach $2 trillion by 2028. The head of content at trading firm GSR stated that banks or fintech companies that ignore the explosive growth in this sector will face a crisis.
This morning, the price of the XPL token fluctuated wildly. From 1:00 AM to 5:00 AM, XPL surged by 42%, reaching a high of $0.167; however, starting at 5:10 AM, the price plummeted by over 40% in less than five minutes, falling below $0.12 and erasing all of the day's gains. Before the price surge, five new addresses on Hyperliquid simultaneously deposited funds at 1:00 AM, each transaction exceeding $200,000, totaling approximately $1.292 million. These addresses then heavily leveraged their positions to open long positions in XPL, seemingly in coordination with other platforms' spot trading to drive up the price. During this period, the five addresses reaped substantial profits, more than doubling their initial investment. Between 4:30 and 4:40 AM, the five addresses withdrew all released margin and profits, causing the liquidation price to rise sharply, nearing liquidation. At 5:10 AM, the five addresses were simultaneously liquidated at an XPL price of approximately $0.12971, causing the price to plummet, seemingly in coordination with spot trading to dump their holdings. The five addresses collectively profited approximately $1.602 million. During the price surge, several large short sellers were targeted and their short positions were liquidated, resulting in a total of over $32.99 million in closed short positions.
The Ethereum Foundation has just staked another 45,034 ETH, worth approximately $93.11 million.
The Ethereum Foundation has just staked another 45,034 ETH ($93.11 million).
Data: Strategy Preferred Stock (STRC) has raised enough funds this week to purchase 4,535 BTC.
Strategy's preferred stock offering, Stretch (STRC), has raised enough funds this week to potentially purchase 4,535 bitcoins.
Seven accounts deposited a total of $1.85 million into Hyperliquid, using leverage to drive up the price of XPL. They then simultaneously withdrew a total of $4.63 million from their collateral balance, profiting approximately $2.78 million. Previously, according to HyperInsight monitoring, XPL experienced a sharp rise followed by a 40% flash crash, with five insider addresses profiting $1.6 million and exiting the market.
