Today's top news highlights:
Regulation & Macro
The Japanese government passed an amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act at a cabinet meeting on April 10, bringing crypto assets under regulation as financial products for the first time and prohibiting insider trading and other illegal activities using undisclosed information. Crypto asset issuers will be required to make annual disclosures. If passed, the bill is expected to take effect in fiscal year 2027. Regarding penalties, the imprisonment sentence for unlicensed sellers will be increased from up to 3 years to up to 10 years, and fines will be increased from up to 3 million yen to up to 10 million yen.
Iranian state media vehemently denied rumors of a trip to Pakistan for negotiations.
Iran's Tasnim News Agency, citing a source familiar with the matter, reported that Foreign Minister Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf have not left Iran and are currently remaining in Tehran to fulfill their state duties. The source stated that reports in some media outlets that an Iranian negotiating team had arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan, to negotiate with the Americans are completely false. Negotiations will remain stalled as long as the United States does not fulfill its commitment to a ceasefire in Lebanon and Israel continues its attacks.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection announced a new cybersecurity information-sharing program for the U.S. digital asset industry, providing eligible digital asset companies and industry organizations with actionable cyber threat intelligence free of charge to help them identify, prevent, and respond to cyberattacks. This initiative implements recommendations from the President’s Working Group on the Digital Asset Markets report.
Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Iranian parliament's National Security Committee, stated that parliament has proposed a permanent ban on oil tankers with ties to the United States and Israel passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Ships with ties to or traveling to Israel will also be prohibited from passage, and the ban will also apply to countries that take action against the 'Resist Front'.
Sources say Iran will not negotiate with the United States until a ceasefire is achieved in Lebanon.
Netanyahu: I have instructed that direct negotiations with Lebanon begin as soon as possible.
Project Updates
Crypto KOL Gorkeu analyzed that the PARTI token's 63% plunge in a short period may be related to market maker Wintermute. Several hours prior, Wintermute transferred a large amount of PARTI tokens from its hot wallet, triggering a massive sell-off. Binance data shows that the PARTI token has now recovered to $0.0492, a 44.22% drop in the last 24 hours.
The Security Governance Committee of the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Alliance officially released the "Guideline for Risk Management of OpenClaw-type Intelligent Agent Deployment". The guideline focuses on the pain points of risk prevention and control for enterprises in the process of technology implementation, and proposes an overall framework and self-inspection specifications for secure deployment covering the entire process of deployment, use and decommissioning. It aims to promote the intelligent agent from being able to be deployed to being deployed securely, used in a standardized manner and continuously governed.
Research: 26 LLM routers are secretly injecting malicious tool calls and stealing credentials.
According to a GoPlus alert, a serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the EngageLab SDK, affecting over 50 million Android users, including approximately 30 million cryptocurrency wallet users. Attackers can install a malicious app masquerading as a legitimate application on compromised devices, sending malicious intents to other applications that integrate the EngageLab SDK. This could lead to unauthorized access, theft of private keys, and login credentials. Developers and users are advised to upgrade to the patched version 4.5.5 or later.
According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi, RAVE has surged 232% in the past 24 hours. Ten hours ago, an address associated with the project deposited 18.58 million RAVE tokens into Bitget, worth $8 million. At the time, the price was $0.43; now it's $1.027, representing a return of $19.08 million. The funds in the two addresses originated from withdrawals from Bitget and transfers from RAVE token deployment addresses.
According to Mempool data, at 14:46 Beijing time on April 9th, an independent Bitcoin miner successfully mined block 944306, earning a block reward of 3.128 BTC, worth approximately $222,000. This is the second case in the past week of an independent miner successfully mining a block using the CKPool service.
Covenant AI has announced its withdrawal from the Bittensor network, accusing Jacob Steeves of controlling the network alone and claiming that its supposed decentralization is merely a decentralization theater. The team stated that Steeves took several actions against them, including suspending subnet emissions and removing management privileges from community channels. Covenant AI maintains that Bittensor's three-way multi-signature structure is not decentralized governance and will continue its research into decentralized AI training.
Several current and former employees have accused blockchain game company Gunzilla Games on LinkedIn of withholding months' worth of employee salaries. The head of recruitment stated that the company has been in arrears with wages for months, and the CEO has ignored employee inquiries; the lead hard-surface artist has not received his August and September salaries; a senior QA engineer has not received salary for five months; and a retired senior VFX animator has not received any salary since October 2025. The company's free-to-play NFT battle royale game, *Off the Grid*, has failed to reach its expected player count.
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a crypto project backed by the Trump family, responded to market uncertainty and clarification regarding the absence of liquidation risks in its lending positions. WLFI stated that as the largest supplier and borrower on WLFI Markets, the company borrows stablecoins using WLFI tokens as collateral, mitigating risk even during periods of significant market volatility by replenishing collateral. Its annualized USD1 revenue run rate has reached $159.5 million. A governance proposal to unlock tokens for early retail buyers will be submitted next week.
According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin, in the past month and a half, approximately 116 million ONDO (US$30.21 million) have been transferred from Ondo Finance's multi-signature wallet to Coinbase. Basically, around 20 million ONDO are transferred out to a multi-signature wallet each week, and then split into multiple transfers to Coinbase.
Metalpha's associated wallet deposited 7,200 ETH, worth $15.79 million, into Binance.
According to Onchain Lens, a wallet associated with Metalpha deposited 7,200 ETH, worth $15.79 million, into Binance.
Opinions & Analysis
In his memoir, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao stated that US cryptocurrency exchanges spent millions of dollars lobbying to block his pardon and funded smear campaigns against him, fearing that a pardon would allow Binance to re-enter the US market. President Trump pardoned Zhao last October. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls and resigned as Binance CEO.
Avihu Levy of StarkWare published a research proposal titled "Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Soft Forks," proposing a quantum-safe Bitcoin scheme called QSB. This scheme aims to make Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computing attacks without altering the core rules of Bitcoin. It uses hash-based assumptions instead of elliptic curve security mechanisms. However, QSB transactions exceed the limitations of standard relay strategies and need to be submitted directly to miners through services such as Slipstream.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao posted on the X platform demanding an apology from OKX CEO Star and launching a $1 billion bet to prove he had already divorced his ex-wife. Star responded that proving Zhao's lies only required demonstrating whether his Binance holdings had been legally separated from his ex-wife, and that he would not participate in a public bet due to compliance requirements. Zhao subsequently stated he would no longer participate in the discussion.
In an interview, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao stated that quantum computing may break existing encryption mechanisms, and Bitcoin may need to upgrade to quantum-resistant cryptography via a hard fork. He pointed out that quantum computing will give rise to new encryption algorithms, and there are already quantum-resistant encryption algorithms that quantum computers cannot break; the solution is simply to upgrade the protocol to use these encryption mechanisms.
TD Cowen stated that the recent White House report on stablecoins is unlikely to eliminate the political obstacles facing cryptocurrency legislation, and the path forward for the Clarity Act may be even more difficult. The report points out that banning stablecoin yields would have a negligible impact on bank lending, generating only $2.1 billion in growth. Analysts believe that as long as small banks continue to view stablecoins as a threat, they will oppose crypto legislation unless the bill explicitly bans stablecoin yields.
CryptoQuant: Bitcoin and Ethereum rally driven by new long positions in perpetual contracts
CryptoQuant's head of research stated that the recent surge in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices was primarily driven by new long positions in the perpetual contract market, rather than short covering. Within 24 hours of the US-Iran ceasefire agreement being announced, open interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetual contracts increased by $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion respectively, reaching near one-month highs. CryptoQuant believes that if the ceasefire holds, Bitcoin's next key target is $79,000.
Important data
According to SoSoValue data, Bitcoin spot ETFs saw a total net inflow of $358 million yesterday. BlackRock's IBIT ETF saw a single-day net inflow of $269 million, with a historical total net inflow of $63.589 billion; Fidelity's FBTC ETF saw a net inflow of $53.3345 million, with a historical total net inflow of $11.034 billion. The total net asset value of Bitcoin spot ETFs is $93.286 billion, with a cumulative net inflow of $56.503 billion.
Huang Licheng made 13 profitable trades in the past week, earning $1.14 million.
According to Lookonchain monitoring, Huang Licheng has not been liquidated for 10 consecutive days, and has made a profit of $1.14 million in 13 consecutive transactions in the past week.
According to SoSoValue data, Ethereum spot ETFs saw a total net inflow of $85.1861 million yesterday. BlackRock ETF ETHA saw a single-day net inflow of $90.938 million, with a historical total net inflow of $11.677 billion; BlackRock Stashed ETH ETF ETHB saw a net inflow of $13.6669 million, with a historical total net inflow of $369 million; Fidelity ETF FETH saw a single-day net outflow of $20.9821 million. The total net asset value of Ethereum spot ETFs is $12.69 billion, with a cumulative net inflow of $11.603 billion.
According to Cryptopolitan, data from CryptoQuant shows that centralized exchange trading volume has plummeted nearly 50% from its peak of over $8 trillion in October 2025 to $4.3 trillion, a 17-month low. Perpetual contract trading volume reached $3.5 trillion, accounting for over 70% of total centralized exchange trading volume. Binance still dominates the market, with nearly $1 trillion in spot trading volume so far this year and $1.4 trillion in perpetual contract trading volume in March, representing a market share of approximately 40%.
According to Lookonchain, address "0x049b" opened 20x leveraged short positions in the past 30 minutes, shorting 562.58 BTC and 18,350 ETH, with a notional position size of approximately $40 million in each. Its BTC liquidation price was approximately $73,717.83, and its ETH liquidation price was approximately $2,243.43.
According to Cointelegraph, Morgan Stanley's head of digital assets stated that the bank's newly launched Bitcoin ETF achieved the best first-day trading performance among all its ETF products, and more crypto products are in the pipeline.
