Today's top news highlights:
Bessant: The US has seized approximately $1 billion worth of Iranian cryptocurrency.
Sui: The mainnet is back online, and transactions are proceeding normally.
CFTC approves Bitcoin perpetual contracts, officially opening the compliant PERPS market in the US.
Regulation & Macro
Bessant: The US has seized approximately $1 billion worth of Iranian cryptocurrency.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessenter stated that the U.S. has seized approximately $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets from Iran, nearly double the previous estimate. The U.S. believes Iran is stealing approximately $400 million to $500 million per month by circumventing sanctions and has directly confiscated its wallets.
Bipartisan lawmakers have introduced the PARITY Act, which aims to modernize digital asset tax rules, strengthen investor protection, provide market certainty, and help ordinary people participate in crypto. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee stated that any crypto tax bill must have bipartisan support. The bill runs parallel to the Senate CLARITY Act and aims to pass by the end of 2026.
CFTC approves Bitcoin perpetual contracts, officially opening the compliant PERPS market in the US.
The CFTC has approved KalshiEX LLC to list BTCPERP perpetual contracts, marking the first time a US regulator has approved the listing of perpetual contracts on a regulated market. Simultaneously, it issued 24/7 trading guidelines, confirming that certain crypto perpetual contracts can be classified as foreign futures products, and sent a letter to Coinbase Financial Markets stating it would not take enforcement action, allowing the use of digital assets and stablecoins as margin for overseas perpetual contracts.
Coinbase Financial Markets has received guidance from the CFTC, becoming the first regulated U.S. futures commission broker to offer U.S. clients access to global crypto perpetual contracts and options liquidity. This initiative allows institutions to access major global crypto derivatives markets through a single regulated channel. Currently, it supports Deribit Bitcoin options, with plans to expand contract and collateral types in the future.
Trump said he was heading to the White House Situation Room to make a final decision on Iran.
Trump stated that Iran must pledge never to possess nuclear weapons and immediately open the Strait of Hormuz. The US and Iran have reached partial agreements on issues such as mine clearance, lifting the maritime blockade, and handling underground enriched nuclear material. The US will cooperate with Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency to destroy relevant nuclear materials, and there will be no exchange of funds until further notice. Trump is heading to the White House Situation Room to make a final decision on the arrangements.
Texas plans to convert its state-level Bitcoin reserve from an ETF to a self-custodied spot asset.
The Texas Treasurer's Office has issued a tender document outlining a plan to transfer approximately $10 million in strategic Bitcoin reserves from BlackRock's IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF to direct holdings held in a third-party custodian, with the migration to be completed within 60 days of contract signing. Texas has also established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Advisory Committee.
Project Updates
The cross-chain bridge Gravity Bridge has been suspected of being attacked, with its contract keys appearing to have been compromised, resulting in the theft of approximately $5.4 million in assets. This includes approximately $4.3 million in USDC, 274 WETH (approximately $553,000), $434,000 in USDT, and $64,000 in PAYG. There has been no official response yet.
Circle blacklisted the confidential USDC (cUSDC) contract address of the privacy protocol Zama on the Ethereum network, resulting in the freezing of approximately $12.6 million in funds for unknown reasons. Previously, ZachXBT had claimed that Circle had frozen more than 16 hot wallets but provided no transparency.
Sui: The mainnet is back online, and transactions are proceeding normally.
The Sui mainnet has been restored and transactions are proceeding normally. Previously, the network was unable to transition to the next epoch because the random number initialization process failed to complete during validator node restarts after an epoch change. A fix has been implemented on the validator nodes, resolving the underlying vulnerability.
The Sui mainnet has stopped accepting user transactions due to an issue during an epoch change. Validator nodes are still running and creating system transactions, but user transactions are temporarily unavailable. The core team is investigating.
The Sui mainnet is experiencing network outages, and on-chain activities may be temporarily suspended. The core development team is actively investigating the cause of the problem.
The Sui mainnet has resumed normal operation. Officially, both network outages were related to an interaction issue between the "address balance" function and the Gas billing logic introduced in version 1.72. Validators have completed the deployment of a long-term fix, completely resolving the known issues.
Base has activated the Azul upgrade on the mainnet, achieving a peak throughput of 5000 TPS.
Base has activated the Azul upgrade on the mainnet, introducing a multi-proof system combining TEE and ZK, which reduces withdrawal finality to approximately one day. The upgrade unifies the execution client to base-reth-node and introduces the base-consensus consensus client, reducing the number of empty blocks per day from approximately 200 to approximately 2, and supporting 5,000 transactions per second in stress tests.
Investment and financing news
ParaFi Capital announced several personnel changes: Adrian Uberto was promoted to President and COO, and Anjan Vinod was promoted to Partner. Jeff Park joined as Partner and Portfolio Manager, Ryan Silva joined as Head of Trading, Dani de la Lama joined as Legal Counsel, and Leah Valente joined as Analyst.
Opinions & Analysis
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis stated that he once owned 2,000 bitcoins, which he later donated, but was saddened by the subsequent drop in bitcoin's price. He opposes the ideology behind bitcoin, considering it an "oligopoly currency" and a dangerous illusion of depoliticized money.
Musk denied reports that SpaceX had lowered its IPO valuation target to at least $1.8 trillion in a post on the X platform.
Important data
In the past week, an Ethereum OG sold 55,000 ETH (worth $112.25 million) and 9,442 wstETH (worth $24 million), at an average price of $2,041.
On May 29, Bitcoin spot ETFs saw a total net outflow of $125 million, marking the 10th consecutive day of net outflows. BlackRock's IBIT saw a net outflow of $68.1994 million, and Fidelity's FBTC saw a net outflow of $31.9473 million. The total net asset value of these ETFs is $94.169 billion, with a net asset ratio of 6.38%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $55.663 billion.
Bitcoin mining difficulty increased by 1.72% to 138.96 T.
Bitcoin mining difficulty increased by 1.72% to 138.96 T at block height 951,552, and the average hashrate of the entire network over the past seven days was 1.02 ZH/s.
An address suspected to belong to Dragonfly transferred 137 million SKY tokens ($9.05 million) to Coinbase. These SKY tokens were worth $20.45 million when withdrawn from Binance approximately five years ago, meaning their value has shrunk by more than half.
A newly created wallet received 25,000 ETH (worth $50.56 million) from Kraken, and this wallet likely belongs to Bitmine.
The largest long position in Micron Technology on Hyperliquid was closed out for profit, entering at $575 and exiting at $956, resulting in a profit of $8.19 million.
A whale holding HYPE genesis tokens has begun profiting, with an estimated gain exceeding $94 million. This address received 819,335 HYPE from the genesis token allocation, then purchased 676,798 HYPE at an average price of $4.29 each. Eight hours ago, it withdrew 500,000 HYPE and deposited 211,001 HYPE into Coinbase, currently holding 1,284,955 HYPE.
The USDC Treasury minted an additional 250 million USDC on the Solana blockchain.
The USDC Treasury has minted an additional 250 million USDC on the Solana chain.
BlackRock deposits over $230 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum into Coinbase.
BlackRock deposited 2,448 BTC (approximately $180 million) and 28,683 ETH (approximately $57.62 million) into Coinbase, totaling over $230 million.
