Brace for Bitcoin price surge as $3bn in shorts set for massive squeeze
Bitcoin is approaching a powder keg of shorts that could send its price rocketing to a new all-time high.
Data from Coinglass shows a massive $3.1 billion in short interest stacked at the $100,000 price level. That‘s just slightly above Bitcoin‘s high of $97,000 on Friday.
Should Bitcoin‘s price climb beyond $100,000, it would liquidate those shorts and trigger a feedback loop of aggressive buys. That scenario is called a short squeeze as bearish bets implode and short sellers are forced to bu
US cuts off Huione over $4bn crypto laundering, North Korea ties, and ‘unfreezable’ stablecoin
Romance scams, North Korean hackers, and an “unfreezable” stablecoin have put a shadowy crypto marketplace in Washington’s crosshairs.
The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has designated Cambodia-based Huione Group a “primary money laundering concern” and proposed to “sever its access to the US financial system.”
In a notice issued yesterday, FinCEN said Huione has laundered at least $4 billion in illicit crypto since 2021.
This included $37 million linked to North Korea’s L
Alpaca, Nous Research lead raises as crypto projects bag $213m
Eleven crypto projects raised $213 million this week, according to DefiLlama.
The amount is about 67% lower from last week, but brings the total raised this year to $7.2 billion.
Let’s take a look at the most notable among them:
Alpaca, $52 million
Alpaca drew the week’s biggest round, a Series C, with participation from Derayah Financial, 850 Management, National Investments Company, Unbound and Portage Ventures.
The investment “allows us to expand our efforts globally,” Yoshi Yokokawa, co
BlackRock says clients are watching Bitcoin for this ‘absolutely critical driver’
BlackRock says Bitcoin will soon be risky not to own.
That’s if, and a big if, the price of the top cryptocurrency truly manages to break free of its tight correlation to riskier assets like US technology stocks.
“The correlation between bitcoin and tech stocks is going to be an absolutely critical driver,” Robbie Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, told DL News. “If Bitcoin trades more like a tech stock, it is not very interesting to institutions.”
Dorsey positions Block’s Bitcoin chip to weather trade shocks: ‘We’re building in the US’
Donald Trump’s roller coaster trade war has rattled Bitcoin miners and chip producers, but Block is betting on resilience.
The company reported $2.29 billion in gross profit for the first quarter, up 9% from a year earlier, and reaffirmed its plan to launch a new Bitcoin mining chip, Proto, later this year.
CEO Jack Dorsey described how domestic production and strong supply chain ties will be a major strategic advantage amid growing concerns about tariffs and overseas manufacturing risk.
Mango Markets exploiter Avi Eisenberg sentenced to four years on child exploitation material charge
Crypto trader Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg was sentenced to four years and four months in prison Thursday for possession of child sexual abuse material.
But a federal judge said he needs more time to consider Avraham’s request for a new trial for his October 2022 exploit of now-defunct, Solana-based decentralised exchange Mango Markets.
A federal jury convicted Eisenberg, 29, of fraud and market manipulation in April of last year for the $110 million exploit.
Robinhood says it wants to be less reliant on crypto for revenue after 30% slump
Robinhood did not escape crypto’s market downturn in the first three months of 2025.
The retail trading platform recorded $252 million in crypto trading revenue between January and March, a 30% decline from the previous quarter. The significant dip tracks the slump that saw the cryptocurrency market dip by an almost equivalent proportion earlier in the year.
Amid the downturn, CEO Vlad Tenev says the company is looking to diversify.
“It’s going to go up and down in terms of trading volume,” T
What deal slump? Ripple, Galaxy and Twenty One buck market slowdown
Ripple, Galaxy Digital, and Twenty One Capital are among crypto companies bucking expectations that deal activity will dry out due to US President Donald Trump’s trade war.
Crypto projects have secured $7.2 billion in venture funding in 2025, within spitting distance of the total $9.6 billion secured through the whole of 2024, according to DefiLlama.
Elsewhere, firms this year have reported 88 merger and acquisition deals worth $8.2 billion, almost triple the total transaction value of all of
Revolut welcomes ‘onerous’ UK rulebook that threatens crypto companies
The UK’s sweeping new crypto regulations may be burdensome, but incumbent fintech companies like Revolut are cheering them on.
The rules, which are said to align more with the US than the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, are seen to be favouring companies that already operate in heavily regulated environments.
“The UK framework appears to be significantly more complex and onerous than MiCA,” Konstantinos Adamos, Group Lead Legal Counsel for Crypto at Revolut, told DL News.
Ripple sees ‘huge’ UK opportunity as new crypto rules inch closer
The UK’s crypto fog might be clearing. And Ripple, the blockchain firm that designed the XRP cryptocurrency for cross-border payments, is cheering it on.
Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s UK and Europe managing director, praised the announcement of a draft crypto legislation and called it a “clear signal of intent” from the government.
“At Ripple, we see huge opportunity here ― it’s why the UK is one of our largest office hubs outside the US, with year-on-year investment into our operations and talent
Solana coalition pitches SEC on tokenisation pilot as market seen topping $19tn
A coalition of crypto organisations is pitching the top US financial watchdog on a new pilot program to put stocks on a public blockchain.
In a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, the Solana Policy Institute and Superstate, a New York tokenisation firm, proposed an 18-month trial program to experiment with issuing and trading tokenised versions of securities.
Lowenstein Sandler LLP, a Washington law firm specialised in blockchain technology and securities regul
Bitcoin ‘decoupling’ galvanises crypto backers as price outperforms gold and tech in April
It was a big month for decoupling — a term for Bitcoin’s divergence from tech stocks’ performance, which the cryptocurrency has mirrored for years.
Bitcoin was up 13% in April, outperforming gold, which gained 7.5%.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq, meanwhile, has dropped 0.1% over the last 30 days.
Analysts have noticed the shift.
“Big boy institutions are waiting for [Bitcoin] to behave like a safe haven,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted. “When it does, look out.”
Tornado Cash prevails in court as judge bars new sanctions
Crypto privacy protocol Tornado Cash cannot be re-sanctioned by the US government.
Tornado Cash users prevailed in a long-running lawsuit this week, when a federal judge in Texas granted their request that he bar the US government from re-sanctioning the protocol, as it had in 2022 due to its use by North Korean hackers.
The protocol’s token, TORN, jumped 5% on the news Tuesday.
The US Department of the Treasury removed Tornado Cash from its list of sanctioned entities in March, citing a “rev
PayPal says SEC closed ‘enforcement action’ in latest dropped crypto case
PayPal just joined a not-so-exclusive club — it is the latest cryptocurrency issuer to escape scrutiny by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
This week, the payments processing giant said the SEC was closing an inquiry into its two-year-old stablecoin without any enforcement action.
The decision is just the latest in a string of dropped or postponed cases and reviews mounted by the SEC during the tenure of former Chair Gary Gensler.
Bitcoin price spiked 27% in April but market is flashing signs of fatigue
Nothing goes up in a straight line, not even Bitcoin.
After a blistering 27% rebound in April, Bitcoin has bounced around the $94,000 price mark this week. Now, signs are flashing red of a possible price pullback for the number one cryptocurrency.
“The current market outlook suggests that Bitcoin price may face more stiff resistance moving forward,” Innokenty Isers, CEO of Paybis, a crypto exchange, told DL News.
There’s a cocktail of bearish metrics swirling through the market.
Celsius ex-CEO Alex Mashinsky says he’s no Sam Bankman-Fried in bid for light sentence
Lawyers for Alex Mashinsky insist the 59-year-old tech executive is no Sam Bankman-Fried.
Federal prosecutors say otherwise.
At stake is the fate of the co-founder of Celsius, the crypto lender that went bankrupt in 2022 not long after the collapse of Terra rocked the market.
Prosecutors on Tuesday asked Judge John G. Koeltl to impose a 20-year prison sentence, citing Mashinsky’s “continuing refusal to accept responsibility for his crimes.”
AI ‘vibe coding’ is thriving in DeFi as concerns mount over shoddy security
For Martin Kupka, vibe coding is a game changer.
As an investor at RockawayX, a crypto-focused venture firm, Kupka is constantly under pressure to find promising startups for his firm to back.
So vibe coding — using artificial intelligence to generate code for games, apps, and even crypto and financial products — is a blessing for budding tech founders, and the investors who bet on them.
“Not having enough Web3 developers was always one of the main constraints for the tech and crypto industry
Trump’s media conglomerate says it’s exploring a cryptocurrency
The Trump crypto empire is looking to add a new token.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind the right-wing social media platform Truth Social, is exploring the launch of a “utility token” for its streaming service, Truth+.
The token would be held in a digital wallet and be used to pay for a Truth+ subscription, according to a shareholder letter on Tuesday.
It may also be used for other products and services within the family of companies that make up Trump Media and Technology