Rising US gas prices due to disrupted oil flows highlight global economic vulnerabilities and potential market volatility amid geopolitical tensions.
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Bitcoin has reclaimed and held above the $75,000 region after the latest rebound, but derivatives data shows the recovery lacks broad conviction. Bitcoin In The Middle Of A Credibility Problem Bloomberg claims Bitcoin has a credibility problem right now. Funding rates on perpetual futures have stayed negative for around a month and a half, meaning leveraged traders are still paying to stay short even as spot grinds higher. This divide ranks among the largest this year between spot price action and how derivatives traders are positioned. Bitcoin has climbed about 14% off its April lows, helped by renewed inflows into US‑listed ETFs and fresh accumulation by Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin treasury firm, MicroStrategy. Related Reading: Hyperliquid’s HIP‑3 Open Interest Skyrockets— Is 24/7 Tokenized Equity About To Rewrite Wall Street? Such a gap between positioning and price rarely lasts long, and it usually ends brutally for someone. When Bitcoin keeps grinding higher, traders shorting the move rack up losses and can be forced to rush in and buy back their positions, driving an abrupt, self‑reinforcing spike known as a short squeeze. The longer this standoff drags on, the more violent that eventual reversal can become. BTC OI-Weighted Funding Rate. Source: Bloomberg. The data brought by Bloomberg shows that net flows into US‑listed spot Bitcoin ETFs have hit about $332 million so far this week, with roughly $26 million added on Thursday alone. By 8 a.m. in London on Friday, Bitcoin was changing hands near the $75,000 mark. This has been one of the longest bearish funding streaks since the post‑FTX capitulation period in late 2022, when sentiment was similarly washed‑out. A Short-Squeeze Risk Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33, told Bloomberg that “Traders are actively building short positions and betting against a breakout, creating conditions where a short squeeze becomes more likely if upward momentum persists”. The current structure looks like a textbook squeeze setup. Negative funding shows that short sellers still dominate leverage and are paying to stay in the trade, even as Bitcoin grinds higher. That slow grind means many of those shorts are already underwater but haven’t capitulated yet, leaving them vulnerable. At the same time, spot liquidity looks thin, so any sharp move can quickly ripple through derivatives and turn into a fast, cascading squeeze. Bloomberg explains that the short-heavy backdrop looks even more fragile given the wave of bullish catalysts hitting the market at the same time, any one of which could spark the kind of upside jolt that forces bears to scramble out of their positions. A Soft Recovery For Bitcoin? MicroStrategy has disclosed two purchases worth a combined $2.6 billion in just the past two weeks, a steady bid that FalconX senior derivatives trader Bohan Jiang says has helped support prices. On top of that, Charles Schwab has unveiled plans to roll out spot crypto trading this year and floated the idea that clients could dedicate up to 8.8% of their portfolios to Bitcoin. This signals just how much fresh demand could still be waiting in the wings. Over the past week alone, US‑listed Bitcoin ETFs have pulled in more than $800 million, flipping from the outflows seen earlier in the year to strong net demand. Every new leg of ETF buying pushes prices higher and makes it more expensive for short sellers to sit in losing trades, ratcheting up the squeeze pressure that has been quietly building in the derivatives market for weeks. Related Reading: Bitcoin Derivatives Are The Earliest Signal Of A Quantum Selloff: Joshua Lim According to Bloomberg, bearish traders could still come out ahead if this latest bounce ultimately breaks down. Deribit data shows options desks paying up for downside protection, with notable open interest clustered in put contracts around the $60,000 and $50,000 strikes. They called this a soft recovery. Laurens Fraussen, research analyst at Kaiko, believes that Bitcoin might see rally that is sure to “catch some people off guard”. Fraussen claims that a break above $76,000 could see BTC extend toward $85,000. At the moment of writing, BTC trades for almost $76k on the daily chart. Source: BTCUSDT on Tradingview. Cover image from Perplexity. BTCUSDT chart from Tradingview.
The proposal highlights Europe's potential shift towards independent military strategies, impacting geopolitical dynamics and market perceptions.
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Industry speakers at Paris Blockchain Week said tokenization can broaden access and issuance, but it does not by itself create active secondary markets for illiquid assets.
Japan has long been one of Ripple's most fertile markets. SBI's investment in Ripple dates to 2016, SBI Remit launched Japan's first XRP-enabled international remittance flow in 2021, and SBI VC Trade counts XRP among its most popular assets. When Ripple and SBI announced in August 2025 that SBI VC Trade intended to distribute RLUSD […]
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The service could enhance Solana's institutional finance role, impacting GCC liquidity and long-term market dynamics.
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About 20% of the Bitcoin mining industry is operating at a loss right now. That single fact explains much of what has been unfolding across the sector in early 2026, as publicly traded miners race to sell off holdings just to keep the lights on. Related Reading: Bitcoin Rally Faces First Test At $76K As Sellers Step In: Analysts Profits Squeezed To The Bone Hashprice — the daily revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power — has been sliding since July 2025. It now sits at roughly $33 per petahash per second per day, according to data from Hashrate Index. The breakeven point for many miners, particularly those running older machines, is around $35. That gap, small as it looks on paper, is pushing a large chunk of the industry into the red. Major publicly traded miners — among them MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer — collectively offloaded more than 32,000 BTC during the first three months of 2026, according to TheEnergyMag. That figure eclipses everything those same companies sold across all four quarters of 2025. It also surpasses the previous quarterly record of roughly 20,000 BTC, set during Q2 2022 when the collapse of the Terra-Luna ecosystem sent markets into a tailspin. Three compounding forces drove miners to that record: a rising network hashrate that has made competition fiercer, reduced block rewards following the most recent halving, and broader economic headwinds that have kept Bitcoin prices under pressure. Miner Reserves Have Been Draining For Years The selling in Q1 2026 did not come out of nowhere. Data from CryptoQuant shows that total Bitcoin held by miners across the board has been falling since 2023. At the close of that year, miners collectively held more than 1.86 million BTC. That number has since dropped to approximately 1.8 million. The trend is slow but steady — and the first quarter’s record sales may have accelerated it further. Asset manager CoinShares, in its Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, warned that more pain could be coming. Higher-cost operators should expect continued capitulation in the first half of this year, the firm said, unless Bitcoin’s price stages a meaningful recovery. Think ₿igger. pic.twitter.com/L1yH3n0k7t — Michael Saylor (@saylor) April 12, 2026 Related Reading: ‘Extremely Good News’ – XRP DeFi Momentum Builds As SEC Softens Position On Interfaces Treasury Buyers Step In As Miners Step Back While miners sell, corporate buyers are moving in the opposite direction. Strategy, the largest Bitcoin treasury company by holdings, has continued adding to its position. Co-founder Michael Saylor signaled earlier this week that another purchase was in the works, sharing the company’s BTC acquisition history chart — a move his followers have come to read as a near-certain signal of an imminent buy. Featured image from MetaAI, chart from TradingView
A successful deal could significantly ease geopolitical tensions and reduce the risk of military conflict in the region.
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The deployment of AI artillery by the IDF suggests a strategic shift towards precision warfare, potentially escalating regional tensions.
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Goldman's Bitcoin ETF signals mainstream acceptance, pressuring other banks to adopt crypto, potentially reshaping financial markets.
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The significant drop in trading volume suggests potential liquidity issues and bearish sentiment, impacting market stability and investor confidence.
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The escalation complicates diplomatic efforts, signaling prolonged conflict and increased geopolitical instability in the region.
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RHODL ratio suggests market conditions resemble cycle corrections rather than late-stage tops, as long-term holders regain dominance.
The US naval blockade may escalate military tensions, complicating diplomatic resolutions and prompting Iran to diversify trade strategies.
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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has shared a detailed and balanced take on Zcash, acknowledging its legacy while pointing out the challenges it faces today. Speaking in a recent discussion highlighted by The Rollup, Hoskinson described Zcash as one of the “OGs of OGs” in crypto, crediting it for pioneering privacy-focused cryptography that is now being …
Geopolitical tensions from the Iran conflict could exacerbate global market volatility, impacting energy supplies and financial stability.
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Norway's increased oil earnings highlight the global economic impact of geopolitical tensions, emphasizing the vulnerability of energy markets.
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The exchange, formerly known as Garantex and based in Kyrgyzstan, has been sanctioned by the U.S., U.K. and EU for helping users bypass sanctions.
Rising oil prices and geopolitical tensions could drive gold's safe-haven demand, impacting global economic stability and central bank policies.
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The optimistic tone from the White House may influence market perceptions, but significant geopolitical hurdles remain for any sovereignty change.
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Estonia's confidence in US support highlights NATO's stability, but market skepticism suggests traders await concrete US actions or rhetoric.
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China's diplomatic efforts could reshape US-Iran relations and influence global geopolitical dynamics, potentially easing tensions.
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The summit's scheduling could ease trade tensions and reduce market uncertainty, impacting global economic and diplomatic dynamics.
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Bitcoin’s quantum risk may show up in derivatives markets well before any compromised coins move on-chain, according to FalconX co-head of markets Joshua Lim, who used an X thread on April 16 to map out what he sees as the most tradable signals around a potential “q-day” event. Lim’s core argument is that the market problem is not simply whether Bitcoin can migrate to post-quantum cryptography. It is also whether the network can politically resolve what to do with Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins and other old outputs that may never participate in such a migration. Quantum Risk Could Hit Bitcoin Through Derivatives Lim framed the issue as two separate questions. The first is technical: how Bitcoin could move away from elliptic curve cryptography used to secure private keys. The second is more fraught. “How to deal with the fundamentally non-mathematical and wholly sociopolitical question of what to do with Satoshi’s coins,” he wrote, arguing that the largest risk around quantum computing is not just cryptographic breakage but the governance crisis that could follow. He said a migration path for most of Bitcoin’s UTXOs is at least conceivable, pointing to BIP 361 as one example of a proposal that addresses both post-quantum migration and the handling of Satoshi-era coins. But that only solves part of the problem. Lim estimated that Satoshi’s holdings amount to roughly 1.1 million BTC, while other old or lost coins in pay-to-public-key addresses could push the total exposed supply to as much as 1.7 million BTC, which he called a “$127bn question.” Related Reading: 9 Reasons Why The Bitcoin Bottom May Already Be In: Expert Those coins, he argued, are different because they likely would not participate in any community-led migration unless Satoshi is still active and willing to move them. That creates two outcomes, neither comfortable for markets. “EITHER Satoshi is still around and can move coins pre q-day, in which case BTC price will tank because the market will re-price the probability of those coins being sold in the future,” Lim wrote. “OR Satoshi is not around and someone will decide to steal the coins via a sufficiently powerful QC.” That is why, in Lim’s telling, Satoshi’s coins are “not a math problem.” The available responses are political. One option would be to burn those coins through governance, a move he said would raise serious questions around immutability, sovereignty, and precedent. The other would be a hard fork that lets the market choose between a chain that neutralizes the coins and one that preserves the current ruleset, even if that leaves open the eventual risk of a quantum-enabled seizure. Lim suggested that even an attempt at the first path could lead to the second. “Our only prophylactic is to EITHER A) burn Satoshi’s coins via governance,” he wrote, before outlining the trade-off, “OR B) create a hard fork and allow for the market to decide which is the true BTC.” In his view, that likely becomes a political contest over Bitcoin’s identity as much as a security response. He added that the most likely quantum thief, if such a scenario emerged, would be “a state-level actor.” From there, Lim shifted from theory to market structure. He contrasted any future fork with Bitcoin’s August 2017 split, which produced BTC and BCH. Back then, he noted, Bitcoin was a roughly $45 billion, mostly retail market, and many holders welcomed the fork because it effectively created an additional asset. Today’s market is different: around $1.5 trillion, far more institutional, and wrapped in ETFs, listed futures, and options. That changes how risk would likely transmit. “A hard fork today, or even the prospect of one, would be an entirely different beast,” Lim wrote. “It would result in extreme volatility and likely downward price action: a large gap down and massive cascading liquidations.” He added that if the community were close to evenly split on whether to burn exposed coins, institutional investors might have a mandate to de-risk ahead of the event, amplifying downside pressure. Related Reading: Bitcoin Bulls Eye $78,000, But Glassnode Urges Caution That is where derivatives come in. Lim argued the earliest warning signs of q-day risk are most likely to emerge in long-dated options skew, forward basis, and the distribution of open interest across traditional and crypto-native venues. He pointed out that long-dated BTC put skew is near multi-year highs, with downside protection relatively expensive compared with calls, and said the last comparable elevation came around the Three Arrows Capital and FTX collapses in 2022. He also flagged long-dated basis, noting that Bitcoin futures are trading near multi-year lows relative to spot. In Lim’s framework, q-day risk should compress or even invert basis because market participants hedge for downside while others position for a possible fork-related “airdrop,” similar in concept to 2017. Since the timing of any quantum breakthrough would be uncertain, he expects those signals to appear farther out on the curve. Still, he stopped short of saying the market is already pricing an imminent quantum event. Some signals are “flashing red,” he wrote, but they can also be explained by broader systemic risks or secular shifts, including growing institutional participation through venues such as CME and IBIT options. For now, Lim described the picture as mixed. His broader point was simpler: if q-day ever begins to look real, traders likely will not first see it in dormant coins moving. They will see it in derivatives. At press time, Bitcoin traded at $75,024. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
The claim could signal a potential de-escalation in US-Iran tensions, but skepticism remains due to past unfulfilled commitments.
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The EU's inability to review Mythos may hinder Anthropic's credibility, affecting its competitive position and market perception in AI.
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BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has revealed that over 90% of his personal wealth remains tied to Bitcoin. But surprisingly, he won’t buy more right now. However, he also said the market may stay unstable due to global tensions and future money printing. In addition to this, he has expressed a stronger relative interest in selective …
A potential US-Iran deal could stabilize regional tensions, impacting global markets and diplomatic relations significantly.
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The proposal's lack of market impact highlights Bitcoin's resilience and raises questions about the community's stance on protocol changes.
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The ceasefire's stability boosts market confidence, yet potential disruptions remain, highlighting geopolitical tensions and economic impacts.
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