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ERC-8004, formally titled “Trustless Agents,” is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal introduced in August 2025 to create a decentralized trust infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Designed to let agents discover, evaluate, and interact with one another without centralized gatekeepers, the proposal went live in reference deployments on Ethereum mainnet in late January 2026.
In plain terms, ERC-8004 answers a simple but critical question: How do machines trust each other on the internet without humans playing referee?
The proposal was authored by Marco De Rossi, Davide Crapis, Jordan Ellis, and Erik Reppel, and published as EIP-8004 in August 2025. The standard builds on existing Ethereum primitives, including EIP-155, EIP-712, and ERC-721, extending them to support machine-native identities and reputations.
It is part of a broader movement to formalize what many are calling the “agent economy” — a world where AI systems transact, negotiate, and perform services autonomously.
At its core, ERC-8004 introduces three onchain registries: Identity, Reputation, and Validation.
The Identity Registry mints each agent as an ERC-721 token, assigning it a globally unique identifier. That NFT points to a registration file describing what the agent does, where it operates, and how to contact it. Think of it as a decentralized passport for AI.
The Reputation Registry allows clients — human or machine — to leave structured feedback, including fixed-point scores, tags, and references to off-chain evidence. That feedback is tamper-evident and queryable onchain, enabling composable trust.
The Validation Registry supports third-party verification of high-stakes tasks, allowing validators to respond with scores between 0 and 100 and optionally attach cryptographic proof. For anything serious — financial advice, model outputs, automated trading — this layer adds teeth.
ERC-8004 is EVM-native and deployed on Ethereum and compatible networks. According to 8004scan.io, there are currently 21,562 registered agents across major EVM chains. Some counts are even higher and nearing 30,000. The data from 8004scan.io indicates that the distribution across networks shows clear concentration in a handful of hubs. The popular blockchain explorer, Etherscan, is also indexing agents as well.
Ethereum leads with 11,369 registered agents, followed by Base with 4,379 and Gnosis with 2,679. BNB Smart Chain accounts for 2,317 agents, while mid-tier deployments include Monad with 128, Optimism with 124, Arbitrum with 110, Polygon with 107 and Linea with 101. Avalanche hosts 98 agents, X Layer has 100, and Celo records 20. Smaller footprints appear on Abstract with 19, MegaETH with 4, Taiko with 3, Scroll with 2 and Mantle with 2, while Plasma currently shows no registered agents.
Ethereum remains the gravitational center, but Layer 2 networks such as Base are quickly establishing themselves as agent hubs.
Existing protocols like MCP and A2A allow agents to advertise capabilities and authenticate with one another. What they do not natively provide is open discovery and portable trust across organizational boundaries.
Instead of relying on centralized marketplaces or curated directories, agents can publish capabilities onchain, accumulate reputation signals and optionally request third-party validation. The result is a neutral infrastructure layer where trust becomes programmable.
With tens of thousands of agents already registered across a myriad of EVM chains, the experiment is no longer theoretical. It is live, indexed, and growing.
Whether this becomes the backbone of a multibillion-dollar agent economy or simply an evolutionary stepping stone will depend on adoption, tooling, and community governance. But one thing is clear: ERC-8004 is giving AI agents a blockchain-native résumé — and letting the market, or agentic economy, decide who earns five stars.
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A meme coin launchpad is a web app that lets anyone create and list a Solana Program Library (SPL) token in minutes, often with a simple form, a bonding-curve or instant- liquidity template, and one-click routing to a decentralized exchange ( DEX). On Solana, these services have multiplied because block space is cheap, settlement is fast, and developer tooling is fairly standardized
Together, that mix lowers the threshold for experimentation and favors high-throughput, low-ticket activity—large daily token counts concentrated on a few venues, with a long tail of platforms that add features or distinct user funnels. These platforms have drawn heavy use in 2025.
Pump.fun is Solana’s incumbent meme-launch venue, known for bonding-curve “fair launches.” Tokens can be created instantly without presales and “graduate” to DEX liquidity after preset thresholds; the team rolled out “Project Ascend” updates this year
Letsbonk (Bonkfun) is built by the BONK community with Raydium rails for immediate trading. It briefly topped daily revenue in July 2025 during a stretch of elevated activity.
Sugar positions itself as a rewards-heavy meme coin launchpad that burns liquidity during migrations and ranks among the higher- volume Solana venues
Bags is a mobile-first app for launching and trading meme tokens; it offers creator royalties, portfolio tracking, and Apple Pay deposits, and it reported $1 billion in trading volume within 30 days of launch.
Believe blends SocialFi mechanics with token creation: users can trigger a launch by replying to X posts from its “Launchcoin” account, then settle into Solana for trading—no wallet setup required initially
Launchlabs (Raydium) is Raydium’s open-source launch front end for SPL tokens, debuted in April 2025, and competes directly with Pump.fun
Moonshot focuses on simple creation (a photo and Apple Pay can be enough) and a feed for discovering trending coins.
In the most recent 24-hour per data from Dune Analytics, Pump.fun recorded 23,640 new tokens and about $160.09 million in volume. Sugar showed 1,608 tokens and about $4.78 million, Letsbonk logged 695 tokens with roughly $2.12 million, and Moonshot posted 468 tokens with
Bags added 451 tokens and about $512,000, Heaven showed 570 tokens with about $244,801, and Jup Studio (210), LaunchLab (106), and Believe (127) rounded out the mid-tier counts. Boop.fun and Wavebreak registered light activity in the latest day.
The multi-month charts tell the broader picture. Pump.fun holds the majority of market share across most days, with a mid-summer stretch where Letsbonk’s share widened before receding. Sugar appears in pulses that lift its share during specific windows, while Moonshot, Bags, Believe, Launchlabs, and Jup Studio contribute smaller but regular slices.
Weekly volume bars echo the same ranking: Pump.fun at the core of activity, a rotating second tier led by Letsbonk and Sugar in discrete phases, and a long tail of specialized venues that show up intermittently. Pump.fun’s dominance makes it the axis around which Solana’s meme coin experiments revolve.
While there’s been some decent swings at its dominance, its volume and token counts still eclipse rivals, shaping the rhythm of launches across the chain. Competitors may carve niches, but Pump.fun’s scale still sets the tone, defining what rapid experimentation and market testing look like in Solana’s high-velocity meme coin economy.
Amid the churn, what emerges may not be a single dominant platform but a shifting arena of ideas tested at scale. The meme coin launchpad wars have only just begun. Solana’s cheap block space acts like an open canvas, allowing hundreds of daily trials.
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As Wall Street moves onchain, the year's biggest crypto hack and DeFi crisis is forcing a rethink of risk, security and market structure, industry insiders told CoinDesk.
In the weeks leading up to the hack, private credit giant Apollo Global Management (APO), which oversees $900 billion, inked a strategic partnership with Morpho to support lending markets with an option to acquire governance tokens of the protocol, too. Around the same time, the world's largest asset manager BlackRock (BK) brought its tokenized money market fund onto decentralized exchange Uniswap
The exploit is unlikely to derail traditional finance (TradFi) pushing deeper into onchain finance, industry insiders argued, but highlighted what DeFi needs to fix before larger pools of capital can move in.
DeFi platforms are pioneering new ways for investors to utilize their capital more efficiently," said Nick Cherney, head of innovation at Janus Henderson, an asset manager that oversees about $500 billion in assets. "Pioneers will always face risks."
Failures like the Kelp DAO exploit can slow momentum, Cherney said, but they also force improvements. Over time, those pressure points tend to produce stronger systems, he argued.
The longer-term shift, in his view, is already taking shape. Tokenized real-world assets — such as funds, bonds and credit — are starting to anchor DeFi markets, bringing legal frameworks and risk controls that traditional finance has refined over decades.
This is a speed bump for sure, but not a roadblock," Cherney said.
Episodes like this one could accelerate that transition, Cherney said.
For security specialists, the lesson is more direct: the current setup is not enough.
DeFi and onchain asset management operate in a highly adversarial environment,” said Paul Vijender, head of security at Gauntlet. “Systems are only as secure as their weakest links."
That reality is pushing the industry toward more comprehensive defenses. Zero-trust architectures — where no part of the system is assumed safe — are becoming harder to avoid, he argued.
In practice, that means layering protections: continuous monitoring, stricter controls, built-in redundancies. Not relying on a single safeguard
Evgeny Gokhberg, founder of digital asset manager Re7 Capital, said many of the industry’s "best practices" now need to become baseline requirements.
That includes timelocks on key governance actions, stricter multi-signature controls, tighter collateral standards and stronger safeguards around bridges — one of the most common points of failure in DeFi.
The industry needs to treat them as baseline requirements, not best practice," he said.
Bhaji Illuminati, CEO of Centrifuge Labs, sees the shift as part of a broader compression of financial evolution.
TradFi has had decades to build up layers of protections," she said. "DeFi is doing that too, but on a vastly accelerated timeline."
For institutions to allocate capital at scale, she argued, a few conditions need to be met.
First is clarity: investors need to know exactly what they own, with verifiable collateral and legal structures that map to real-world risk.
Second is reliability: smart contracts, oracles and governance processes must behave in predictable, auditable ways.
Third is liquidity that holds up under pressure, allowing capital to move in and out without distorting markets.
Being open and secure is not mutually exclusive," Illuminati said. "The goal is to make trust explicit and verifiable."
Going forward, every layer of the DeFi stack needs to make security their number one priority,"she said. "This is becoming increasingly important in the age of artificial intelligence."
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The latest move comes alongside gains in equities, which opened higher in the U.S.
At the same time, oil prices slipped after reports that Iran sent a fresh proposal aimed at restarting negotiations with the United States. The news raised hopes that tensions could ease, at least in the near term.
Brent crude futures for July were down 26 cents, or 0.23%, at $107.74 a barrel. Supply concerns have not gone away. Tehran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route, while the U.S. Navy is stopping exports of Iranian crude.
This mix of easing headlines and ongoing constraints helps explain the muted reaction in oil. Traders appear cautious, weighing the chance of a deal against the reality on the ground.
For bitcoin, the focus remains on whether it can finally clear $80,000, which is by many seen as a key breakout level. A push above that level could draw in more buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines.
“I think $80,000 is quite a resistance… we need a confident push through that level,” said 21shares chief market strategist Adrian Fritz. “Once we're above that, it could spark some momentum… people are back in profit, especially the ones that invested more recently.”
Fritz said if bitcoin reaches a level above $85,000, the market could start to see the first signs of a reversal.
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The Conservative and Labour parties argued Nigel Farage broke Commons rules by not declaring the £5 million, but Reform UK said it was an exempt, personal, unconditional gift.
Farage confirmed the gift in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, saying it was meant to keep him "safe and secure for the rest of my life" after a milkshake was thrown at him in 2019 and a firebomb attack on his home last year.
Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman with a 12% stake in stablecoin issuer Tether, made the payment in 2024. Farage announced his Clacton candidacy in early June last year and won the seat in July.
A Reform UK spokesman called the payment a "personal unconditional gift" given before Farage was elected and said his decision to stand as an MP was "entirely unrelated
The spokesman, the report added, said "We are confident everything has been declared in accordance with the rules."
The Commons code of conduct requires new MPs to register benefits received in the 12 months before their election, and says any benefit should be registered if there is doubt. Reform says the gift falls under the exemption for purely personal gifts.
The country’s main opposition Conservative Party wrote to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg asking him to examine whether any of the funds were used to support political activity rather than security. Labour chair Anna Turley said Farage "appears to have broken the rules again."
Harborne gave Reform £9 million, then worth around $12 million, late last year in the largest single donation to a U.K. political party from a living person on record.
Earlier this month, BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo said in an op-ed he had given Reform £4 million ($5.1 million) since the start of the year.
The U.K. government imposed an immediate moratorium on crypto donations to political parties in March, citing the Rycroft review's warning that digital assets could be used to channel foreign money into U.K. politics.
The ban covers donations of any size and will be written into the Representation of the People Bill, with criminal penalties for non-compliance.
That same month, Farage invested £215,000 ($286,000) in Stack BTC, a London-listed bitcoin treasury company chaired by former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, taking a 6.31% stake through his investment vehicle Thorn In The Side.
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Canada budget deficit over first 11 months of 2025/26 rises to C$25.55 bln
OTTAWA, April 24 (Reuters) - Canada recorded a higher C$25.55 billion ($18.66 billion) budget deficit ​for the first 11 months of ‌the 2025/26 fiscal year as government expenditures grew faster than revenues, the finance ministry said ​on Friday.
By comparison, the deficit ​in the same period a year ⁠earlier had been C$19.27 billion, it ​said in a statement.
Program expenses rose 2.1% ​on increases across almost all major categories of spending. Public debt charges shrank slightly by ​0.1% reflecting the impact of lower ​interest rates on treasury bills and other instruments. This ‌was ⁠partly offset by higher average effective interest rates on an increased stock of marketable bonds, the ministry said.
Year-to-date revenues ​grew by ​0.8%, ⁠largely reflecting higher income from custom import duties and corporate ​and personal income tax revenues.
On ​a ⁠monthly basis, Canada posted a surplus of C$5.66 billion in February, compared to ⁠a ​C$7.57 billion surplus in ​February 2025.
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$153 million in daily volume. $4 billion total. $200 million in the first week alone. Polymarket’s 5-minute prediction markets have gone from experimental product to one of the highest-velocity trading venues in DeFi – and Chainlink oracles are the reason any of it works.
The volume surge, confirmed by on-chain data shared across crypto analytics channels, represents a roughly 400% increase from earlier baseline figures, with the 3x weekly growth rate still accelerating as of the latest reporting window
Standard oracle infrastructure built for hourly or daily market resolution can tolerate latency. A price feed delayed by 30 seconds is noise when a contract settles in 48 hours
In 5-minute prediction markets, that same 30-second delay is the difference between a valid settlement and a manipulated one, exactly why Polymarket’s architecture required a fundamentally different oracle setup.
Chainlink’s Data Streams integration, deployed on Polygon where Polymarket settles, delivers timestamped price reports at sub-second intervals
Combined with Chainlink Automation handling the on-chain settlement triggers, the system processes the full cycle, price confirmation, contract resolution, USDC payout, without human intervention and without the manipulation vector that centralized price feeds introduce.
The oracles provide the official price feeds that trigger contract settlements, removing the need for a centralized authority entirely.
The scale of what’s now running through this infrastructure is significant. Over 3,000 traders are actively using Chainlink Data Streams across integrated platforms, and the Dashlink dashboard tracking oracle demand shows a direct correlation between the Polymarket volume surge and a decline in LINK exchange reserves – whales are pulling supply off exchanges as network utilization hits new highs for prediction market settlements.
Native USDC collateral adoption within these markets has further accelerated institutional participation by improving capital efficiency.
The appeal is obvious: a platform already under scrutiny for insider trading patterns on longer-duration markets now offers a format where information asymmetry has a 5-minute shelf life.
The risks are real and shouldn’t be buried. Short timeframes amplify volatility, HFT-dominated order flow can crowd out retail, and oracle delays, however rare, carry outsized consequences when resolution windows are measured in minutes.
But the volume data doesn’t lie: the format is capturing demand that didn’t have an instrument before.
Liquid Chain built a Unified Liquidity Layer that aggregates capital across multiple Layer-2 networks using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the messaging backbone
The core problem it solves is real and expensive – assets stranded on individual L2s require manual bridging, creating slippage, delay, and trust assumptions that institutional allocators won’t accept
Liquid Chain’s architecture lets users move assets seamlessly across chains without manual bridge interactions, with CCIP handling the verification and message-passing layer beneath the surface
The project has been pitching its Layer-3 DeFi buildout as a credible answer to the fragmentation problem, and the Convergence judges agreed
Other notable hackathon submissions concentrated on Real-World Asset tokenization and DeFi automation – a consistent signal that Chainlink’s developer community is orienting toward institutional-grade infrastructure rather than consumer speculation. The CCIP adoption rate implied by the hackathon submissions validates Chainlink’s cross-chain positioning at exactly the moment demand for tamper-proof oracle settlement is breaking records on Polymarket
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Washington, DC – When the White House announced that Donald Trump would be making a speech to the nation about the war on Iran, it was expected that the United States president would make a major announcement.
But in his remarks late on Wednesday, which lasted less than 20 minutes, Trump only repeated the same statements he has been circulating for weeks.
Some analysts had expected Trump to announce either an end to the war or an escalation in the conflict, such as ground operations inside Iran, but the US president only gave the public and the media more of the same rhetoric.
Here are the key takeaways from the address
In his brief remarks, the US president made four familiar points: The war is necessary; it has already been won; it must continue; and it will wrap up soon – all arguments he has been making daily.
The US president did not provide details on how the war would actually end or what kind of deal he is seeking with Iran.
We are gonna finish the job. We are getting very close,” Trump said.
Trump said on March 11 that the war would end “soon”.
“I don’t think that the speech had any point, and I failed to grasp what he was trying to do and convey. It was really a repetition of everything that he had said in the past,” Sina Azodi, assistant professor of Middle East Politics at George Washington University, told Al Jazeera.
“I did not detect anything new. Essentially, it was a summary of all of the tweets he has issued over the last 30 days, almost in chronological order,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute, told Al Jazeera.
But precisely because it does not appear to have anything new in it, it reveals that he really does not have a plan.”
While the speech did not include any major announcement, it provided Trump with a chance to make his case to a US public that is weary of foreign conflicts after the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump’s main point was that Iran was going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them, so the US and Israel had to act.
But Trump himself had repeatedly said that the US strikes on Iran’s facilities in June 2025 had obliterated the country’s nuclear programme.
Even before last year’s war, Trump’s own intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, told lawmakers that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”.
Iran has repeatedly denied seeking a nuclear weapon, while Israel is widely believed to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Trump also suggested on Wednesday that the conflict was about settling scores with Iran after decades of rivalry between Washington and Tehran
“This fanatical regime has been chanting, ‘Death to America. Death to Israel’ for 47 years. Their proxies were behind the murder of 241 Americans in the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the slaughter of hundreds of our service members with roadside bombs,” Trump said
They were involved in the attack on the USS Cole, and they carried out the countless other heinous acts, including the just horrible, bloody atrocities of October 7 in Israel.
The USS Cole bombing in 2000 was carried out by al-Qaeda operatives with no known links to Iran
There also has been no evidence linking Iran directly to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel, which was followed by a US-backed war on Gaza that leading rights experts say amounts to genocide.
Public opinion polls have suggested that a strong majority of people in the US oppose the conflict. On Wednesday, Trump tried to amplify the same talking points that have failed to rally the public around the war over the past month.
Parsi noted that the war is losing popularity in Trump’s own Republican base.
A recent YouGov poll suggested that only 28 percent of respondents, including 61 percent of Republicans, support the war.
In a previous YouGov survey released on March 2, 76 percent of Republican respondents said they support the war.
“They’re losing patience,” Parsi said of Trump’s supporters. “They’re paying the price at the gas station, at the grocery store, and it’s going to get much, much worse if this continues.”
Still, some Trump allies were happy with Wednesday’s speech.
PERFECT SPEECH,” pro-Israel commentator Mark Levin wrote on X.
Since the start of last week, Trump has been saying the US is negotiating with Iran, suggesting that a deal may be imminent.
Less than 24 hours before his address on Wednesday, Trump wrote in a social media post that “Iran’s New Regime President” asked the US for a ceasefire, suggesting that negotiations may be ongoing.
Iranians were quick to deny the claim. They have previously dismissed Trump’s assertions of negotiations while confirming that some messages have been exchanged through intermediaries. Iran also does not have a new president – Masoud Pezeshkian has been president since 2024.
Iranian officials have accused Washington of fabricating reports about diplomacy to manipulate the energy markets.
Despite Iran’s denials, Trump and his aides have repeatedly stressed that Iran is being untruthful and that there are indeed talks between the two countries.
However, on Wednesday, Trump did not mention diplomacy or negotiations.
What caught my attention was the fact that he didn’t say anything about the talks – if there are any,” Azodi said.
Throughout his remarks, Trump kept returning to the central point of his speech: that the US has won already and it only needs a little more time to “finish the job”.
We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders,” the US president said.
That means eliminating Iran’s navy, which is now absolutely destroyed, hurting their air force and their missile programme at levels never seen before, and annihilating their defence industrial.
Trump also asserted that Iran’s ability to retaliate against US attacks is all but vanquished
Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces – very few of them left,” Trump said.
But shortly after Trump concluded his remarks, Iran launched another missile attack against Israel.
Simultaneously, Bahrain issued a warning for residents to “head to the nearest safe place” amid an incoming Iranian attack. Earlier on Wednesday, Qatar said a cruise missile fired from Iran had hit a QatarEnergy liquefied natural gas (LNG) ship off the country’s coast. Qatar also said that its military had intercepted two other Iranian cruise missiles.
Still, Trump’s victory lap on Wednesday included claims that the US has changed the ruling system in Iran.
Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead,” the US president said.
While US-Israeli attacks did kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several top political and military officials, there have been no major defections within the Iranian ruling system.
Khamenei was replaced by his son Mojtaba, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is spearheading the war effort, has promised to continue the fight and “punish” the US and Israel.
Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), ridiculed Trump’s claim of regime change in Iran.
Trump hasn’t changed the regime; if anything, he’s honed it to its hardest core. It’s interesting he thinks this clearly false claim is so important to spin. It’s Trump’s way of admitting failure,” Abdi told Al Jazeera.
Trump acknowledged that Americans are paying more for petrol, but he promised that the economic pain would only be temporary.
Many Americans have been concerned to see the recent rise in gasoline prices here at home,” he said.
This short-term increase has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers in neighbouring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict. This is yet more proof that Iran can never be trusted with nuclear weapons
The average gas prices surpassed $4 per gallon (3.8 litres) this week – the highest since 2022.
Iran has responded to the US and Israeli attacks by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a major waterway for the international energy trade.
While the US – a major energy producer – is largely self-sufficient when it comes to oil, supply issues affect prices across the world and send prices soaring globally.
However, Trump argued on Wednesday that countries dependent on Gulf oil should take the lead on resolving the Hormuz crisis, although the US launched the war unilaterally with Israel
Build up some delayed courage,” he said in a message to countries that import Gulf oil.
They] should have done it before, should have done it with us, as we asked. Go to the strait and just take it, protect it
Trump said the US will continue to bomb Iran into “the Stone Ages”, reiterating his threat to target the country’s electric grid
“If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said
Bombing civilian sites is prohibited under international law
Iran has warned that if its power plants are struck, it would retaliate against energy and electric infrastructure across the region
“It means that the rules-based international system is dead and there is no longer a facade,” Azodi said of Trump’s threat
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Senegal cracks down on foreign trips for ministers as global oil prices surge
Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko says crude prices are nearing double the budget benchmark, forcing urgent fiscal adjustments.
Senegal has banned ministers from non-essential foreign travel to curb rising government spending amid escalating oil prices.
The move reflects a broader African response, with countries adopting measures to manage fuel costs and energy shortages.
Experts warn that disruptions to global supply chains could worsen food security, especially in vulnerable regions.
Addressing a youth rally on Friday, Sonko revealed that the cost of a barrel of oil was nearing twice the level initially projected in the national budget, signalling a sharp and unexpected fiscal strain.
In response, he confirmed that he had personally suspended planned visits to Niger, Spain, and France, underscoring the seriousness of the government’s cost-cutting drive.
Further measures to rein in public expenditure are expected, with the minister of mines set to outline additional steps in the coming days.
Senegal’s decision reflects a broader continental response to surging energy costs, driven in part by escalating tensions in the Middle East. Several African countries are already adjusting policies to cushion the impact, including tax reductions on fuel and energy rationing.
Despite recent progress in developing its domestic oil and gas sector, Senegal remains heavily reliant on imported fuel, leaving it vulnerable to global price shocks. Sonko acknowledged the challenges but sought to strike a measured tone, telling young people he did not wish to “frighten” them, but rather to offer “a sense of this world, which is a difficult world”. He added that, even in hardship, Senegalese citizens remained resilient.
The country’s economic outlook had appeared strong as recently as last year, with the International Monetary Fund describing growth as “robust” at nearly 8% and inflation relatively low. However, high public debt, estimated at over 130% of GDP, continues to weigh heavily. Sonko attributed much of this burden to the previous administration, arguing it has compounded the current crisis.
Across Africa, the ripple effects are becoming increasingly visible. South Africa has moved to cut fuel taxes; Ethiopia is grappling with fuel shortages that have disrupted public services; and South Sudan has begun rationing electricity. Zimbabwe, meanwhile, is increasing ethanol blending in petrol.
Compounding concerns, disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have constrained fertiliser supplies globally, prompting warnings of a looming food security crisis, particularly in East Africa.
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Several major investment firms have preemptively downgraded Coinbase and other platforms as a sharp drop in trading activity and falling token prices threaten to derail upcoming first-quarter earnings results.
Barclays took the most direct step, downgrading Coinbase (COIN) and warning that “global crypto trading activity has declined to a level not seen since the end of 2023.” The bank added that “absent a resurgence in near-term crypto trading activity, we see profitability under pressure at Coinbase.”
The slowdown is visible in the data. Coinbase’s March trading volume marked “the lowest volume month since September 2024,” Barclays wrote, with April showing “no signs of improvement.” For the first quarter, the bank estimates volumes fell roughly 30% from the prior quarter.
Coinbase and other exchanges charge fees on each transaction they facilitate, meaning lower volumes will lead to less revenue.
The mechanics are straightforward. When markets turn quiet, many traders step back. A retail user who once traded weekly during a rally may stop altogether when prices flatten. Multiply that behavior across millions of accounts, and exchange volumes drop quickly.
That matters because transaction fees remain the main revenue driver for most crypto platforms. Barclays underscored this risk, saying its forecast for Coinbase’s adjusted EBITDA is about 24% below the Street, driven largely by weaker spot trading and retail activity.
Crypto prices have pulled back in the first quarter, with the average price of major tokens falling sharply quarter-over-quarter. Bitcoin lost over 22% of its value in the first quarter of this year, while ether was down 29%.
Oppenheimer struck a similar tone but kept a more upbeat stance on Coinbase. The firm said it is cutting its forecasts due to softer crypto prices and lower trading activity in the first quarter, driven in part by broader economic uncertainty. It also noted that current Wall Street estimates still do not fully reflect the drop in trading volumes during that period.
Across the industry, analysts are revising models downward to reflect a quieter market.
Oppenheimer cut its Coinbase volume estimate to $211 billion for the quarter, down from $244 billion previously, and now expects total revenue of $1.48 billion, below prior forecasts and consensus.
The reset is not limited to Coinbase. Oppenheimer said that Circle (CRCL) continues to expand the USDC stablecoin network, with stablecoin market cap and USDC transfer volume rising about 1% and 12% quarter over quarter, respectively.
Crypto platform Bullish (BLSH), the owner of CoinDesk, saw “strong on platform activity” tied to volatility in February, though spot volumes still missed expectations. As a result, Rosenblatt downgraded BLSH earlier this week while Compass Point downgraded CRCL — to "neutral" and "sell," respectively.
Even these pockets of strength highlight the broader issue: the core business of crypto trading is slowing.
Efforts to diversify revenue streams are underway but may take time to offset the downturn. Coinbase’s push into becoming what it calls an “everything exchange” includes derivatives, tokenized assets and new markets. Barclays was skeptical, writing that the strategy is “likely to take a long time to pay off” and that it sees “little ‘right to win’ in new asset classes like equities.”
Stablecoins, often seen as a steadier revenue stream, also face uncertainty. Barclays pointed to ongoing debate in Washington over regulation, noting that the status of stablecoin rewards “remains in question.” At the same time, Oppenheimer sees near-term support from new use cases, saying “increased prediction market activity could support USDC growth.
Still, those areas remain secondary to trading.
The broader takeaway is that analysts are moving preemptively. With earnings season approaching, firms are lowering estimates now rather than risk being caught off guard by weak results later.
Coinbase reports second-quarter earnings on May 7 and Bullish reports on April 23. Circle has not yet announced a date.
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