ASHFAQ NAEEM

Starknet, an Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by StarkWare, has officially launched strkBTC, a new bitcoin-based asset designed to enable private balances and confidential transfers while maintaining full composability across decentralized finance applications.
Initially unveiled in February, the token uses Starknet's zero-knowledge cryptography to provide an advanced shielding mechanism that is compliance-ready, the team said in a statement shared with The Block. The asset functions as a shielded bitcoin (BTC) wrapper operating on Starknet rather than on the Bitcoin base layer itself.
Upon launch, strkBTC enables re-anonymization to bridge back to fresh, unlinked Bitcoin addresses, with compliance-ready auditability and asset screening, the team said. Future upgrades aim to bring confidential DeFi features such as shielded lending, trading, and yield on Starknet.
The shielding mechanism aims to address what the project describes as growing demand for privacy tools and rising threats against bitcoin holders identified through public blockchain data. Blockchain security firm CertiK recorded 34 verified incidents globally in 2026 through early May, a 41% increase from the same period in 2025, with AI tools reportedly aiding attackers to connect public wallet addresses to physical identities with up to 90% precision.
"When you have criminals monitoring the public ledger, using AI to trace wallets, and attacking people for their crypto, privacy is no longer just a lofty ideal," Starknet Foundation VP of Growth Damian Chen said. "Privacy is both a need as well as a right. We urgently need privacy solutions that close the drapes, meaning that the criminals can’t see through the window to plot against their targets."
"Bitcoin is the most sovereign money ever created, and also the least private money most people have ever used. For fifteen years, we told ourselves the public ledger was a feature. But in 2026, it has become a map into our private lives," Chen added. "We are launching strkBTC because the world has changed since 2008."
How strkBTC works
As a technical wrapper for bitcoin, strkBTC is designed to bridge bitcoin into a shielded environment on Starknet, allowing users and institutions to protect balances and transaction histories while still retaining compliance with audits, tax reporting, and legal requirements. Contributors described it as a tool that "prioritizes immediate utility over theoretical purity."
In contrast to older privacy protocols, strkBTC is built for regulatory disclosure where lawfully requested, the team explained.
Viewing keys allow independent third-party compliance reviewers to disclose limited data to tax authorities, auditors, or other regulatory bodies upon lawful request, they said, with users also receiving a viewing key to unshield transactions for their own purposes.
Such "compliant transactions" unlock a range of use cases that were previously restricted from interacting with BTC, the project argued, including private payroll, commercially sensitive payments, and strategic capital deployment, aiming to make bitcoin usable as "private onchain cash."
Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of Starknet developer StarkWare, described the launch as "private digital cash — the way it should be." Ben-Sasson was a co-founder of Zcash and argued that strkBTC represents a major advance in some of the ideas that propelled that project. "A strkBTC economy will allow users and institutions to shield balances, which is much needed for the sake of our rights, our safety, and to drive adoption too," he said.
strkBTC roadmap
The initiative also forms part of Starknet’s broader effort to activate bitcoin as a "productive" financial asset, expanding prior staking, yield, and BTCFi programs on the network.
The project's roadmap includes research into quantum-resistant cryptography for strkBTC, integration with BitVM to reduce trust assumptions through a 1-of-N security model, and a longer-term goal of a fully trustless bridge enabled by a potential OP_CAT soft fork allowing Bitcoin to natively verify Starknet proofs.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
#strk $STRK #BTC $BTC #ZK $ZK #ClarityActDraft

Starknet (STRK) faced strong selling pressure after traders reacted to growing fears around upcoming token unlocks, weak altcoin momentum, and heavy short-term speculation. According to recent unlock schedules, Starknet is set to release around 2.26% of total supply this month, adding millions of tokens into circulation. Markets usually price in these unlocks early because investors fear early backers and ecosystem wallets may sell part of their holdings, increasing supply and reducing short-term demand. (TradingView)
On the technical side, STRK’s chart shows a classic “pump then distribution” structure. After rallying aggressively toward the $0.063-$0.064 zone, buyers failed to maintain momentum and volume started fading. Once momentum weakened, short-term traders began taking profits while leveraged longs were liquidated, accelerating the downside move. The chart also shows repeated lower highs after the peak, confirming bearish market structure on lower timeframes. Current price action around the $0.053 area suggests traders are defending a temporary support zone, but the inability to reclaim $0.056-$0.058 quickly keeps the market under pressure.
Another major reason behind the dump is broader capital rotation across crypto markets. Recently, liquidity has been flowing back into Bitcoin and large-cap assets while many mid and low-cap altcoins lost momentum. Analysts noted that STRK has been underperforming despite relatively stable broader market conditions, showing that traders are avoiding riskier Layer-2 tokens during uncertainty. (CoinMarketCap)
Fundamentally, Starknet still remains one of the stronger ZK-rollup projects in the Ethereum ecosystem, backed by StarkWare technology and long-term scaling narratives. However, tokenomics remain a concern for many investors because of ongoing vesting schedules and future dilution risk. With a total supply of 10 billion STRK tokens, the market continues monitoring unlock events closely. (KuCoin)
From a trading perspective, the most important level now is the psychological $0.050 support. If STRK loses this area with strong volume, the market could revisit deeper liquidity zones near previous lows. On the upside, reclaiming $0.056 and holding above it would signal buyers returning to the market. Until then, volatility is likely to remain high as traders react to unlock news, liquidity conditions, and overall altcoin sentiment.
Despite the recent dump, some traders still view STRK as a long-term ecosystem play because of its role in Ethereum scaling and zero-knowledge technology. But in the short term, token unlock pressure, weak momentum, and market-wide risk-off sentiment are currently dominating price action.
#strk $STRK #Square

South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit, has partnered with Optimism to build a new Ethereum Layer 2 using the OP tech stack.
Optimism is perhaps the go-to solution for institutions looking to launch a dedicated blockchain, having served centralized and decentralized exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Uniswap, crypto projects like World and Zora, and even multinational conglomerate Sony in their efforts.
Notably, the so-called GIWA Chain will be the first chain to launch on the Self-Managed tier of OP Enterprise, meaning Upbit will run the chain itself while the Optimism Foundation provides tech support, according to an announcement on Monday.
"What we hear consistently from the largest exchanges and institutional operators is that they want to own the chain their users transact on, not rent it," Jing Wang, Optimism Foundation director, said in the release.
Some of the nearly three dozen chains launched using the OP Stack are "fully managed," with the Optimism Foundation running the chain's primary sequencer, controlling the chain’s configuration, and holding operational authority.
A sequencer is a core component of a rollup that sequences how transactions are added into a block. In addition to determining what transactions are included or denied, which may matter for compliance reasons, it is also a revenue generator by capturing the fees users generate.
“Self-Managed is built for operators who can't cede operational control. For a regulated exchange serving Korean and global institutional users, giving up sequencer control over Upbit's chain was never going to be acceptable,” Optimism wrote in a blog.
Upbit claims to serve upwards of 13 million registered users and has ranked as high as No. 2 globally by cumulative spot trading volume, according to CoinGecko. “At that size, the math stops working for renting someone else's infrastructure,” Optimism noted.
According to the announcement, GIWA Chain is currently live on testnet.
The firms signed a memorandum of understanding for Optimism to provide a “safety net” for Upbit, essentially equating to an institutional-grade backup including monitoring, a failover sequencer, priority patches, and guidance, according to the announcement.
“Taking on the full weight of chain resilience alone, running the single instance of sequencer infrastructure that millions of users depend on, is a burden few single-operator chains can credibly sustain,” the blog reads.
While Optimism’s “Self Managed” tier appears to be new, it’s worth clarifying that many chains launched using the OP Stack, like Base, Ink and Unichain have always used sequencers controlled by the chain operator rather than Optimism.
Many of the OP Stack chains are part of the so-called Superchain, where independent networks share interoperability, infrastructure, and governance features, and pay a small percentage of their sequencer revenue to the Optimism Collective, but are operationally distinct.
Earlier this year, Base, the blockchain initially built by Coinbase using the OP Stack, announced it would migrate to its own unified in-house stack.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
#Optimisim $OP #USDT

Optimism will participate in Consensus 2026 in Miami on May 5th. The team will attend the Institutional Summit and host an evening with Upbit Global for institutional investors, fund managers and senior executives.

OP Info
Optimism is a Layer 2 (L2) solution designed to enhance the speed and scalability of the Ethereum network. The project aims to improve performance and transaction speed on Ethereum while reducing costs. Optimism utilizes optimistic rollups technology.
Optimistic rollups are a second-layer technology that operates on top of the Ethereum mainnet and significantly increases its throughput capacity. These rollups enable the bundling of multiple transactions into a single block, which is then confirmed on the Ethereum mainnet. This approach greatly accelerates transaction processing and reduces costs since a larger number of transactions can be processed simultaneously.
The Optimism system is compatible with standard Ethereum development tools such as Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it easy for developers to migrate their applications to this platform.
OP is the native governance token. The token can be used to participate in project governance within the Optimism Collective community and to vote on protocol upgrades and fund distribution.
#OP $OP #Write2Earn

Major crypto payments card provider Ether.fi has completed its migration to OP Mainnet, bringing 70,000 active cards, 300,000 accounts, and $200 million in TVL to the Ethereum scaling solution.
The move represents “the largest single TVL event in OP Mainnet history,” a representative for the firm told The Block, and will likely catalyze OP’s transaction volume value given Etherfi’s millions of dollars worth of daily real-world payments.
According to Etherfi, the full migration wrapped up in just three days with zero downtime for cards or users. The Optimism Foundation collaborated by providing bridge engineering, oracles, asset metadata, and other technical support.
Etherfi first signaled it was looking to migrate to Optimism’s canonical solution in February. The app was first launched on the Scroll network, and accounted for a significant portion of that blockchain’s TVL and transaction volume.
Earlier this year, OP tokenholders voted to use protocol rewards to pay for token buybacks.
With the move, OP Mainnet is set to become a significant player in the crypto card space, which has seen the collective daily transaction count surge to 100,000 transactions today from 60,000 in mid-January, The Block Research previously found.
Etherfi accounts for roughly one-third of all crypto card transactions, equating to about one-tenth of the total U.S. dollar transaction value, according to The Block's data. That said, the card sector is increasingly competitive, with offerings from Gnosis, Metamask, and Solayer, among others. Etherfi's transaction volume share stood at about one-half at the beginning of the year.
Optimistic shift
Etherfi said it switched to the OP optimistic rollup from the ZK-powered Scroll because the OP Mainnet offered lower median fees of $0.00001, sub-250 millisecond finality, and ever-improving throughput metrics. "OP is scaling from 20Mgas/sec to 100Mgas/sec," a rep said. For reference, the entire OP Stack processed 3.6 billion transactions in the second half of 2025, representing 13% of all crypto transactions during that period.
“For a payment product that settles real money every day, those are the conditions the product needs to grow,” Etherfi wrote in a blog. “Optimism is committed to scaling OP Mainnet cheaply as the protocols on it get bigger. The infrastructure gets better as ether.fi's product gets bigger.”
The team plans to release a Gold Vault and a Euro card.
The team was also attracted by OP’s “Superchain” thesis, or the network of networks that enables OP tech stack chains to more readily share liquidity, security, and other features. This also helps boost Etherfi’s integrations into DeFi apps and in yield strategies — which could potentially generate “richer cashback economics” for the card provider.
“Every dollar that arrives on OP Mainnet makes the next dollar cheaper to move, easier to pair, and faster to put to work. That is the flywheel. Etherfi's $200 million deepens every liquidity pool already here, and it changes the calculation for the next protocol weighing the same decision,” Etherfi wrote.
A vast majority of the OP ecosystem’s historical usage was driven by Coinbase’s Base network, which is transitioning away from heavy reliance on Optimism in favor of its own unified, Base-operated stack.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
#ETH🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 $ETH

#OP $OP
#BitcoinPriceTrends #USDT

The market conditions have been choppy in recent weeks, with Bitcoin bouncing between $65,000 and $72,000.
However, TAO, the native coin of the Bittensor project, has been one of the steady performers during that period.
TAO is currently trading at $341 on Wednesday after surging by nearly 10% so far this week.
Improving sentiment across the derivatives market supports a bullish outlook for TAO, while technical analysis suggests a continuation of the bullish trend, aiming for levels above $400 in the upcoming days.
TAO rallies as derivatives data support a bullish bias
TAO is up by 9% in the last 24 hours and is now trading at $341 per coin.
The rally comes amid improved retail demand for the coin.
Data obtained from CoinGlass shows that TAO’s futures Open Interest (OI) reached a record high of $554.98 million on March 26 and, despite a slight pullback, remains on an upward trajectory, standing at $413.65 million as of Wednesday.
The surging OI indicates new or additional money entering the market and new buying, which could fuel a second leg higher in the TAO price.
Additionally, TAO’s funding rate flipped positive on Tuesday and stands at 0.008% on Wednesday, indicating that longs are paying shorts.
Usually, when funding rates turn positive, TAO’s price has significantly increased.
In addition to the bullish derivatives data, market sentiment also supports a risk-on stance amid easing geopolitical tensions between the US and Iran.
The announcement of a two-week ceasefire could further fuel TAO’s upward momentum.
TAO bulls aim for levels above $400
The
TAOUSD
4-hour chart is one of the most bullish among the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
The near-term bias for this coin remains extremely bullish as TAO holds well above the 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages near $258-$275.
The strong support around these levels keeps the broader uptrend intact despite the recent pullback from the $377 area.
The momentum indicators also show that TAO could be preparing for another leg up over the coming hours or days.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the 4-hour chart at 70 stays in positive territory without showing outright overbought stress.
Meanwhile, the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) line climbs toward the signal line above zero, suggesting fading bearish pressure after the correction.
If the $377 resistance level holds, TAO’s price could slip lower in the near term and could retest the immediate support at $298, which roughly aligns with the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement at $294, measured from the $142 low to the $539 high.
COINBASE:TAOUSD 4H Chart" class="wp-image-684012"/>
Currently, TAO is trading at $341, which aligns with the 50% FIB retracement.
If the daily candle closes above this level, TAO could retest the $377 swing high before rallying towards the $388 resistance zone. 
An extended bullish scenario would pave the way for TAO to hit the $400 psychological mark for the first time in 2026.
#TAO $TAO #MarketRebound