Today's top news highlights:
US Treasury Secretary: The US has seized nearly $500 million in Iranian crypto assets.
Wasabi Protocol suffered an attack that resulted in approximately $2.9 million in losses.
Hyperliquid updates its official documentation to clarify the fee logic for result tokens in HIP-4.
Regulation & Macro
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved Nasdaq ISE's increase of the position and exercise limit for iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) options from 250,000 to 1 million units. The SEC believes IBIT has sufficient liquidity and market size, and that increasing the limit will not increase the risk of market manipulation. This limit is consistent with the option limit standards for ETFs such as EEM, FXI, and EFA.
US Treasury Secretary: The US has seized nearly $500 million in Iranian crypto assets.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated on the program that the United States has seized nearly $500 million in Iranian crypto assets as part of Operation Economic Fury, which aims to plunge the Iranian regime into crisis by seizing Iranian assets, freezing bank accounts, and pressuring foreign governments to sever ties with Iran.
Upbit will delist the DRIFT token on June 1st.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit will terminate trading support for the DRIFT token at 15:00 on June 1, 2026, affecting the DRIFT/KRW, DRIFT/BTC, and DRIFT/USDT trading pairs. Upbit previously listed DRIFT as a designated item for trading caution on April 2, and after review, determined that the reasons for designation had not been eliminated, hence the decision to terminate trading support.
The Korea Personal Data Protection Commission has launched an investigation into Upbit and Bithumb's sharing of order books with overseas exchanges, focusing on the cross-border transfer of personal information. The commission has completed its written investigation and on-site inspections and expects to finish by the end of the year. While order book sharing can increase liquidity, the transfer of user identification information could violate personal data protection laws.
A South Korean court halted the financial authorities' six-month investigation into Bithumb.
IPO filings: Musk has veto power over his own removal at SpaceX
Warsh's nomination as Federal Reserve Chairman was approved by a Senate panel.
The U.S. Senate Banking Committee voted to submit Warsh's nomination as Federal Reserve Chairman to the full Senate.
Project Updates
Wasabi Protocol suffered an attack that resulted in approximately $2.9 million in losses.
Wasabi Protocol has been attacked, resulting in a loss of approximately $2.9 million. The attacker was granted privileged roles by the Wasabi deployer wallet, indicating that the deployer wallet may have been compromised. The stolen funds are currently distributed across three wallet addresses.
Binance Alpha will open its airdrop today at 18:00, with a minimum requirement of 240 points.
Binance will open the Binance Alpha airdrop today at 18:00 (UTC+8), using an upgraded Alpha blind box model. The airdrop prize pool includes tokens from multiple projects. Users holding at least 240 Binance Alpha Points can claim one airdrop, costing 15 points. The airdrop has three reward tiers: Regular (80%), Rare (15%), and Hidden (5%). If the rewards are not distributed, the points threshold will decrease by 5 points every five minutes.
Payments giant PayPal announced a strategic restructuring, simplifying its business into three core segments: Payments & Checkout and PayPal, Consumer Financial Services and Venmo, and Cryptocurrency & Payment Services. Cryptocurrency & Payment Services is now a separate core business unit, unifying payment processing, platform capabilities, and crypto operations, including Braintree, small and medium-sized merchant payment processing, value-added services, and the stablecoin PYUSD. Jeff Pomeroy has been appointed interim head of this segment. PayPal will provide more details during its earnings call on May 5th.
Visa has expanded its global stablecoin settlement pilot to five new networks: Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo, bringing the total number of supported networks to nine. Visa's blockchain settlement annualized operational rate has reached $7 billion, representing a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase. Visa currently operates over 130 stablecoin-linked card projects in more than 50 countries. Previously, it supported the Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Stellar networks.
Hyperliquid updates its official documentation to clarify the fee logic for result tokens in HIP-4.
The Hyperliquid team has updated its official documentation, clarifying the fee logic for result tokens in HIP-4. Key points: Opening positions is free; fees are only incurred for closing or settling positions; six scenarios are covered: minting (no fee), normal trading, burning, and settlement; aligned quote tokens enjoy a 20% reduction in taker fees and a 50% increase in order book rebates. The fee formula has been made public to developers.
Binance will add watch tags for NFP, NOM, POND, QUICK, and VIC.
According to a recent review, Binance will add watch tags to NFPrompt Token (NFP), Nomina (NOM), Marlin (POND), QuickSwap (QUICK), and Viction (VIC) on April 30, 2026. These tokens may have higher volatility and risk, and Binance will monitor them closely.
BlockSec: Wasabi Protocol's abnormal fund flows total approximately $5.15 million.
According to BlockSec Phalcon monitoring, Wasabi Protocol experienced a series of unusual transactions on the Ethereum and Base chains, with a total abnormal fund flow of approximately $5.15 million. Initial investigations indicate that an account funded by Tornado Cash was later granted ADMIN_ROLE permissions and participated in the related fund flows. Previous reports indicated that Wasabi Protocol had been attacked and had lost approximately $2.9 million.
MegaETH token MEGA will be listed on April 30th at 18:00.
MegaETH announced that the MEGA token will be launched on April 30th, with on-chain functionality enabled at 18:00 and off-chain services launched at 19:00.
Coinbase will launch perpetual contracts for AMD, ARM, Intel, MU, and SNDK.
Coinbase will launch perpetual contract trading for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), ARM, Intel (INTC), Micron (MU), and SanDisk (SNDK) on April 29, with the ticker symbols AMD-PERP, ARM-PERP, INTC-PERP, MU-PERP, and SNDK-PERP, respectively.
DeepSeek launches image recognition mode
Aftermath Finance, the perpetual contract platform on the Sui blockchain, was attacked on April 29th, resulting in losses exceeding $1.14 million. Attackers misused ADMIN privileges and exploited a sign mismatch vulnerability in the `calculate_taker_fees` function to repeatedly extract tokens. Aftermath confirmed the total loss of $1.14 million and is working to recover the funds. Thanks to support from Mysten Labs and the Sui Foundation, all users will receive full compensation. It was emphasized that the issue was not related to the Move contract language security.
Visa integrates Polygon into its global stablecoin settlement network.
Visa has integrated the Polygon network into its global stablecoin settlement program, allowing card issuers and acquiring institutions to complete stablecoin settlements on Polygon. The program currently has an annualized settlement volume of approximately $7 billion, growing by 50% in the past three months. Approximately 34% of USD stablecoin transfers and 54% of USDC transfers occur on Polygon. In March, there were 178 million USD stablecoin transactions, with a total stablecoin supply of approximately $3.62 billion on Polygon and approximately 3.19 million weekly active stablecoin addresses.
Investment and financing news
Latin American digital wallet Belo has raised $14 million in Series A funding, led by Tether with participation from Titan Fund and others. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Argentina, Belo boasts over 3 million users and offers wallet services that allow users to hold and transfer both local fiat currency and digital dollars. The company plans to use the funding to expand into Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and to deepen its presence in Brazil.
Parallel Web Systems, the AI infrastructure company founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has completed a $100 million Series B funding round, valuing the company at $2 billion post-money. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and others. Parallel provides web search and access control infrastructure for long-cycle AI agents. It has raised a total of $230 million, has approximately 50 employees, and serves over 100,000 developers and enterprise clients.
Squads, a multi-signature protocol project within the Solana ecosystem, has completed an $18 million equity funding round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, and others, bringing its total funding to $42.9 million. Squads will use the funds to expand its stablecoin settlement platform, Altitude, which has processed over $200 million in payments since its public beta launch last December. The platform incorporates compliance procedures and integrates with payment service providers such as Bridge and MoonPay.
Crypto payment company MoonPay has acquired Israeli crypto security startup Sodot in an all-stock transaction worth approximately $100 million. MoonPay will use this acquisition to form a new division, MoonPay Institutional, which will specialize in providing services such as crypto trading, tokenized securities, payments, wallet management, and stablecoin issuance to large traditional financial institutions. The division will be led by former acting chair of the U.S. CFTC, Caroline D. Pham.
Opinions & Analysis
According to CryptoQuant analyst EgyHash, USDT liquidity remains the primary engine of Bitcoin price discovery. 60-day USDT market capitalization data shows the market has sharply reversed its liquidity crunch, exhibiting a V-shaped recovery, while Bitcoin has consolidated in the $77,000 to $78,000 range. This historic shift from negative to positive liquidity is typically a leading indicator of expanding volatility. Analysts believe the market has moved from a period of capital withdrawal to one of aggressive replenishment, providing structural support for current prices, but medium-term success depends on whether newly added USDT can translate into sustained spot demand.
Analysis: The yield on the 30-year US Treasury note hit 5%, which may put pressure on Bitcoin.
The yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 5%, its highest level since July 2025. Several crypto analysts believe this is bearish for Bitcoin. Diana Pires, Chief Commercial Officer of sFOX, stated that as long as yields remain attractive and the Federal Reserve maintains its tightening stance, capital will have options beyond risk assets. The CEO of the Giottus exchange pointed out that rising Treasury yields and a stronger dollar have historically put pressure on crypto valuations by tightening financial conditions. Matt Mena, an analyst at 21Shares, believes that the Fed keeping interest rates unchanged and the fact that three voting officials opposed easing guidance are hawkish signals.
23pds, Chief Information Security Officer of SlowMist, stated that a logical vulnerability called Copy Fail has been discovered in Linux systems, which is extremely easy to exploit. All major Linux distributions released in the past nine years are affected by this vulnerability. A small and portable Python script can gain root privileges and quickly escalate privileges on all platforms. Users are advised to upgrade immediately.
Important data
Yesterday (April 29th, Eastern Time), Bitcoin spot ETFs saw a total net outflow of $138 million. The largest single-day net inflow was seen in the Morgan Stanley ETF (MSBT), with a net inflow of $10.8149 million; the largest net outflow was seen in the BlackRock ETF (IBIT), with a net outflow of $54.7251 million. The total net asset value of Bitcoin spot ETFs is $99.267 billion, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $58.073 billion.
Tether Treasury mints an additional 1 billion USDT on the Tron network.
At 15:45 Beijing time, Tether Treasury minted an additional 1 billion USDT on the Tron network.
HYPE whale Loracle.hl began selling after receiving 556,825 HYPE tokens ($22 million) and simultaneously increased its 5x leveraged short position in HYPE, worth over $32 million.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's vitalik.eth address continues to sell free Meme tokens, raising approximately 114,600 USDC and 155 ETH ($355,000) in the past 24 hours.
Two newly created wallets received 312 BTC ($23.62 million) from BitGo in the past 24 hours.
Yesterday (April 29th, Eastern Time), the Ethereum spot ETF saw a total net outflow of $87.7256 million. The largest single-day net outflow was seen in Fidelity FETH, with a net outflow of $48.3737 million; followed by BlackRock ETHA, with a net outflow of $37.0565 million. The total net asset value of the Ethereum spot ETF is $13.096 billion, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $11.939 billion.
BlackRock deposits over $110 million in BTC and $13.38 million in ETH into Coinbase.
BlackRock deposited 1,473 BTC (approximately $114.34 million) and 5,738 ETH (approximately $13.38 million) into Coinbase.
