Today's top news highlights:
Drift Protocol receives up to $127.5 million in backing from Tether for user compensation.
NFT platform Foundation will gradually cease operations due to a failed sale.
Upbit will list SOON tokens on the Korean won market.
Listed crypto mining companies sold more Bitcoin in Q1 2026 than in the entire year of 2025.
Regulation & Macro
A ten-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect on Thursday. US President Trump indicated that the next US-Iran meeting could take place this weekend, further fueling optimism that the war with Iran is nearing its end. Trump stated that the US has obtained a substantial statement guaranteeing Iran will not possess nuclear weapons, a commitment that will remain in effect for over 20 years. Trump also stated that Iran has agreed not to possess nuclear weapons, and the prospects for an agreement are very optimistic, with Iran having agreed to almost all of its demands. Trump added that the agreement also includes free oil and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has not publicly confirmed that it has made these concessions. Some Gulf Arab and European leaders predict that a US-Iran peace agreement will take approximately six months to reach.
Trump: Israel and Lebanon agree to a 10-day ceasefire
US President Trump said he had spoken with the Lebanese president and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the two leaders agreed to begin a 10-day ceasefire at 5 p.m. Eastern Time in order to achieve peace between the two countries.
The Tennessee Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act will have a Senate hearing on April 20.
The Tennessee Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act is scheduled to have a hearing on April 20 before the Senate Finance Committee, bringing it one step closer to becoming law.
U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Mike Selig faced questioning from lawmakers at a House Agriculture Committee hearing on prediction markets, Hyperliquid, and staffing. Democratic Representative Jim Costa expressed dissatisfaction with contracts allowing bets on events such as the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, calling it profiting from tragedy rather than market innovation. Selig stated that the CFTC has issued advance notice of proposed rulemaking to address issues with these new markets. Republican Representative Austin Scott raised concerns about oil contracts on Hyperliquid, warning of potential harm to U.S. consumers. Selig stated that these markets are being monitored with the goal of bringing them under U.S. regulation. Lawmakers also expressed concerns about whether the CFTC has sufficient staff to regulate prediction markets and the crypto industry. Selig stated that the agency is more efficient than ever, hiring more staff and using AI for monitoring. The CFTC is currently supposed to have five commissioners, but President Trump has not yet nominated anyone to fill the vacancies.
Project Updates
A Brazilian security researcher has warned that a Ledger Nano S Plus device he purchased from a Chinese e-commerce platform was a sophisticated counterfeit designed to steal users' crypto assets. The device was priced the same as the official store, and its packaging and product page appeared legitimate, but it failed to pass authenticity verification after connecting to the official Ledger Live app. Disassembly revealed that the device's hardware and firmware had been tampered with, including embedded WiFi and Bluetooth antennas, and the chip markings had been scratched off. Analysis of the firmware showed that the device, upon startup, displayed the manufacturer as Shanghai-listed Espressif Systems. The researcher advises users to only download and purchase devices from official channels. Earlier this month, more than 50 victims suffered losses totaling $9.5 million due to the leak of mnemonic phrases from a fake Ledger Live app listed on the Apple App Store.
NFT platform Foundation will gradually cease operations due to a failed sale.
Kayvon, co-founder of NFT platform Foundation, stated on the X platform that the platform will be gradually ceasing operations due to unfinished sales transactions. Foundation reached a sales agreement with a buyer earlier this year, but the transaction failed to complete as expected, and given the current market conditions, the team believes there are no other worthwhile buyers. The platform's infrastructure has been gradually shut down and cannot be restored online. Foundation emphasizes that it is a non-custodial platform, and users' assets remain under their own on-chain control. The platform plans to continue anchoring the underlying media and metadata of Foundation-issued assets over the next year and encourages the community to anchor assets of interest. For users who have already listed NFTs on the Foundation marketplace, their NFTs are stored in the marketplace smart contract, and the team is providing a convenient way for users to cancel listings and retrieve their NFTs.
Przemysław Kral, CEO of Polish cryptocurrency exchange Zonda, announced that an address holds approximately 4,503 BTC, stating that the private key to this cold wallet was not transferred by founder and former CEO Sylwester Suszek during the company's handover. Zonda has recently faced scrutiny due to withdrawal delays and suspected bankruptcy rumors. Blockchain platform Recoveryis previously speculated that the company might be insolvent based on a sharp drop in hot wallet balances. Kral denied claims of misappropriation of funds and bankruptcy, attributing the withdrawal pressure to a surge in withdrawals triggered by media reports around April 6th, and stated that the company will take legal action and fulfill its obligations to users regarding withdrawals. A Polish parliamentarian claimed that Zonda may have lost access to this cold wallet after Suszek's disappearance in 2022.
A trader bought ASTEROID for $960 and made a profit of $337,000 in less than two hours.
A trader spent only 11 SOL to buy 158.51 million ASTEROID through 3 wallets, and sold 134.75 million ASTEROID in less than 2 hours, obtaining 1,539 SOL. He still holds 23.76 million ASTEROID, with a total profit of $337,000.
Circle faces class-action lawsuit for failing to freeze funds stolen from Drift.
Stablecoin issuer Circle is facing a class-action lawsuit over a security vulnerability in the Drift Protocol. A Drift investor representing over 100 members filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court, accusing Circle of allowing attackers to transfer approximately $230 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum within hours during the April 1st theft of approximately $280 million from the Drift Protocol without intervention. The lawsuit alleges that Circle aided and abetted the asset conversion and acted negligently. The plaintiffs' lawyers pointed out that Circle had frozen 16 USDC wallets in a sealing-off civil case about a week before the Drift incident, demonstrating its technical capabilities. ARK Invest's head of digital asset research believes Circle is in a dilemma; freezing funds without a legal order opens the door to arbitrary discretion.
Charles Schwab has announced the launch of a spot cryptocurrency trading service called Schwab Crypto, which will be rolled out to retail clients in phases over the next few weeks. The service will support direct trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum and will be integrated with its existing research, education, wealth management, and banking businesses.
Lobster.cash has partnered with Mastercard to allow AI agents to make secure payments using existing Mastercard holders' cards. This follows news in February that Crossmint launched lobster.cash, an open payment standard that provides secure transaction support for OpenClaw agents.
SpiderPool has launched NAT-based same-block distribution, emphasizing dual incentives for miners.
SpiderPool, the world's fifth-largest mining pool, has pioneered the distribution of Bitcoin within the same block as DMT-NAT, officially ushering in a new era of dual-level rewards for the industry. NAT is the first Bitcoin native asset based on the theory of digital matter, sharing the same computing power, public chain, block, and address as BTC, and is produced synchronously with each block every ten minutes. Currently, NAT produces approximately 386 million coins per block, with a single block value of 38 USDT and a total market capitalization of approximately $38 million USD. Block rewards will gradually decrease with increasing computing difficulty and block height. Once the single block reward reaches $50,000 USD, it is expected to alleviate the income pressure on miners, forming a positive cycle of NAT appreciation—increased miner income—expanded computing power—increased BTC price, injecting new and permanent momentum into Bitcoin mining.
Upbit will list SOON tokens on the Korean won market.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit will list the SOON token on the Korean won market.
Mint Blockchain officially ceased operations on April 17, 2026. Users are required to withdraw their ETH, WBTC, USDC, and USDT assets from Mint Chain to the Ethereum mainnet before October 20, 2026. Assets not withdrawn by the deadline will be unprocessable.
Tether has frozen 3.29 million USDT in the Rhea Finance hacker address.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino posted on the X platform that Tether has frozen 3.29 million USDT in the Rhea Finance hacker address. Previously, it was reported that Rhea Finance was attacked by fake token contracts, resulting in the theft of approximately $7.6 million.
Alibaba's Tongyi Lab has open-sourced the sparse MoE model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, boasting 35 billion total parameters but only 3 billion activated during inference. It claims to significantly outperform its predecessor on programming benchmarks such as SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench, and can be compared to even denser models. This model natively supports image-text, multimodal, and spatial intelligence. It is already open-sourced on Hugging Face and ModelScope, can be deployed locally, and is planned to be available through Alibaba Cloud's Bailian platform as an API compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic protocols, supporting integration with programming assistants such as OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Qwen Code.
Grinex, an exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan with ties to the Russian cryptocurrency market, has suspended withdrawals and trading following a massive cyberattack. The exchange stated on its website that over 1 billion rubles were stolen, and that the attack was a coordinated effort aimed at undermining Russia's financial sovereignty, requiring resources and technology exclusive to hostile states. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reported that the suspected attackers stole approximately $15 million worth of USDT from Grinex-related wallets, subsequently routing it through the Tron and Ethereum networks and exchanging it for TRX and ETH, possibly to mitigate the risk of being frozen by Tether. Grinex, considered the successor to the previously sanctioned Garantex exchange, has become a major venue for ruble-to-cryptocurrency trading.
Drift Protocol receives up to $127.5 million in backing from Tether for user compensation.
Following the theft of approximately $296 million in assets on April 1st, Drift Protocol plans to compensate affected users by establishing a user recovery pool with partners such as Tether and issuing dedicated recovery tokens. Tether plans to provide up to $127.5 million in support, while other partners plan to provide $20 million, totaling $100 million in revenue-linked credit, ecosystem funding, and market maker loans. The approximately $295 million in user losses will be gradually covered by exchange revenue and support funds. Drift will also issue transferable recovery tokens to affected users, corresponding to their recovery pool claims. After completing independent audits by security firms Ottersec and Asymmetric, the protocol will be restarted, and settlement assets will be migrated from USDC to USDT.
Opinions & Analysis
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated in an article on the X platform that the agent economy has not yet been fully priced in by the market. Machine-to-machine payments will drive demand for the digital dollar beyond current expectations. The agent economy could potentially surpass the human economy in scale, and Coinbase is building the infrastructure for both.
Cardano founder: BIP-361 is actually a hard fork and cannot save Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated that BIP-361, the Bitcoin quantum defense solution proposed by developers Jameson Lopp and others, was incorrectly labeled as a soft fork and requires a hard fork in practice, which conflicts with Bitcoin's culture of resisting hard forks. He pointed out that the zero-knowledge proof-based recovery mechanism in the solution cannot protect approximately 1.7 million early Bitcoins, including about 1 million held by Satoshi Nakamoto, because these tokens were created before the introduction of the BIP-39 mnemonic phrase standard in 2013 and used the local key pool in the original Bitcoin wallet software instead of a recoverable mnemonic phrase seed, thus failing to provide the cryptographic credentials required for zero-knowledge proofs. If the proposal passes in its current form, these early tokens will be permanently frozen. Lopp admitted that he disliked the proposal, calling it a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a final specification. Hoskinson believes that Bitcoin's lack of a formal on-chain governance mechanism makes it impossible to resolve such controversial escalations through a structured process.
Morgan Stanley's Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Amy Oldenburg, stated that cryptocurrencies are transitioning from a peripheral business to core operations, becoming an integral part of daily business. She took the position in February to integrate digital asset strategy and execution within the institutional wealth and asset management division, aiming to integrate crypto and tokenization into existing infrastructure. Oldenburg noted that wallet infrastructure, custody, data sources, and compliance systems are undergoing comprehensive upgrades, but the integration of traditional financial systems with blockchain settlement remains a major challenge, particularly given the still-undefined regulations surrounding tokenization and stablecoins. She believes tokenization is a mechanism for value creation, not an end in itself, and scalability is the current constraint. Morgan Stanley is gradually expanding its clients' access to crypto assets, starting with Bitcoin ETPs and expanding to a wider range of products and digital wallets. The MSBT Bitcoin ETF, launched last week, surpassed $100 million in size within its first six days.
Glassnode analyst CryptoViz.art stated that it is still too early to assert the start of a new Bitcoin bull market. Bitcoin's real market average is $78,013, and the current price below that level puts active holders at a loss. Since Bitcoin's price fell below this level on January 31st, it has remained below that level for 75 days, currently showing a loss of approximately 5%. Historical data shows that in the cycles of 2018 and 2022, bottoms occurred between the 5th and 9th months. Meanwhile, capital continues to flow into the Bitcoin market. CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. pointed out that the 365-day growth rate of market capitalization relative to realized market capitalization has remained negative for all 105 trading days in 2026, indicating that the market has failed to attract enough new funds to support higher prices. Data shows that Bitcoin's realized market capitalization has fallen from $1.12 trillion to $1.08 trillion since the beginning of the year, a drop of 3.23%. While recent indicators have improved, they only suggest a slowdown in the rate of capital outflow, not a bullish reversal.
CryptoQuant's on-chain data shows that whales holding more than 1,000 Bitcoins have added approximately 270,000 Bitcoins in the past 30 days, roughly 20 times the daily new supply, marking the largest buying spree since 2013. Strategy purchased approximately 42,166 Bitcoins during this period, accounting for about 16% of the whales' purchases. Glassnode data shows that the US spot Bitcoin ETF recorded a net inflow of approximately $205 million during the same period, but this is still moderate compared to the earlier stages of the cycle. From a technical perspective, Bitcoin has broken out of a symmetrical triangle consolidation pattern, with a target of approximately $92,220. Coin Bureau founder Nic Puckrin stated that if the current US-Iran ceasefire remains, oil prices fall to around $80, and economic data alleviates stagflation concerns, Bitcoin could potentially advance towards $90,000.
Important data
Listed crypto mining companies sold more Bitcoin in Q1 2026 than in the entire year of 2025.
Publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies, including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer, sold over 32,000 Bitcoins in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding their total sales for the entire year of 2025 and setting a new record for quarterly mining company sales. The previous record was 20,000 Bitcoins sold during the Terra-Luna crash in the second quarter of 2022. The current hashrate price has fallen to a historic low of below $35 per PH/s per day, with levels around $33 leaving approximately 20% of miners operating at a loss. Miners face multiple pressures, including rising hashrate, halving block rewards, and macroeconomic headwinds. CryptoQuant data shows that the total amount of Bitcoin held by miners has decreased from 1.86 million at the end of 2023 to approximately 1.8 million currently. CoinShares predicts that unless Bitcoin prices rebound significantly, high-cost miners will further exit the market in the first half of 2026. In contrast, Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy continue to buy.
Over the past four days, 55% of the circulating supply of AKE has been transferred to Binance Alpha by four wallets, which may have caused AKE to pull back by 65% after surging to $0.00158 yesterday. Since these AKE began entering Binance Alpha, daily trading volume has soared from $2 million to $34 million.
After the SIREN market maker recovered the tokens that had been dumped at the beginning of the month and regained control of more than 93% of the tokens, the price surged 185% in the last 24 hours, rising from $0.13 to $2.18.
Six hours ago, a wallet purchased 590,900 HYPE from a Galaxy Digital OTC wallet, equivalent to approximately $25.92 million. A cluster of six wallets, possibly belonging to the same entity, exists, holding a total of 4,114,200 HYPE. All of these wallets have received HYPE from Galaxy OTC.
The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies fell 20.4% to $2.4 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, a pullback of approximately 45% from its October 2025 high. During the same period, the total market capitalization of stablecoins remained relatively stable at $309.9 billion. Tether USDT issuance saw its first significant decline since the second quarter of 2022, falling 1.6% to $184.1 billion, while Circle USDC increased by 2.4% to $77.1 billion. Bitcoin's price fell 22% quarter-on-quarter, underperforming major US stock indices. Centralized exchange spot trading volume declined 39.1% quarter-on-quarter to $2.7 trillion; among decentralized exchanges, Solana continued to lead with a 30.6% share. On Hyperliquid, open interest in commodity perpetual contracts accounted for approximately 30% of the total, and 24/7 oil contract trading volume at one point exceeded the platform's daily Bitcoin trading volume.
