Morning Edition
BTC crossed $75K overnight. Goldman filed a Bitcoin ETF. The next Fed chair is holding DeFi tokens. Wednesday is off to a good start.
1. BTC Crosses $75K - First Time Since February 5 Crash
Bitcoin climbed to its highest level since the February 5 crash that sent prices plunging to $60K. The $75K print reverses the entire Feb-April range and puts the cycle high back in scope.
The catalyst: optimism over Middle East developments sparked a sharp decline in oil prices and a rally across risk markets. That’s the same dynamic that drove Tuesday’s $74K break - peace talk signals from Trump removing the geopolitical risk premium that’s been weighing on BTC for weeks.
Analysts are now watching whether $75K holds. If it does, the next key levels are $78K and the all-time high zone above $80K. If it fades, $72-73K becomes the ceiling again - the same range that capped every rally since late March.
2. Goldman Sachs Files Bitcoin Income ETF
Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin Premium ETF that generates income by selling options tied to Bitcoin’s price. At least 80% of assets go into Bitcoin exposure (spot ETFs and derivatives), with the remaining 20% deployed in an options overlay strategy.
This is the same playbook BlackRock has been running with yield-focused products. Goldman coming in with a covered call structure means two of the largest asset managers on Earth are now building Bitcoin income products in parallel.
The income angle matters for a different client segment than pure spot exposure: yield-seeking institutional allocators who need Bitcoin exposure to fit inside income-mandate portfolios. That’s a large addressable market that pure spot ETFs haven’t reached.
3. Next Fed Chair Kevin Warsh Has DeFi Exposure in His Portfolio
Kevin Warsh’s financial disclosure reveals stakes in DeFi protocols, Ethereum scaling networks, a Bitcoin Lightning startup, and prediction markets - all of which he’s promised to sell.
The disclosure is notable for two reasons. First, the next person likely to run monetary policy for the United States has been holding DeFi positions, which tells you something about where the smart money has been moving. Second, the “promise to sell” means forced selling pressure is coming into specific tokens once confirmation proceeds - worth watching for which protocols get the outflow.
The broader signal: crypto is now mainstream enough that a Fed chair candidate holds it personally. That wasn’t true three years ago.
4. JPMorgan CFO Warns Stablecoins Risk Becoming “Regulatory Arbitrage”
During JPMorgan’s earnings call, CFO Jeremy Barnum warned that stablecoins could become a tool for regulatory arbitrage unless they’re held to the same strict oversight and consumer protection standards as traditional bank deposits.
This is the banking lobby’s clearest statement yet on the stablecoin threat. JPMorgan isn’t against stablecoins - they’re building on-chain infrastructure themselves. But they want the same compliance burden applied to digital dollar issuers that applies to bank deposit-taking. From their perspective, Circle or Tether operating without deposit insurance or capital requirements is a structural competitive advantage, not innovation.
It also positions the bank to defend against CLARITY Act provisions that might allow stablecoin issuers to operate outside the traditional banking regulatory perimeter.
5. Rakuten to Accept XRP Payments for 44 Million Customers
Rakuten Pay users in Japan can now use XRP as a payment method. They can also spot trade XRP via the Rakuten Pay app and exchange Rakuten points for XRP.
44 million customers is not a pilot. This is one of Japan’s largest e-commerce platforms integrating crypto payments at scale into its existing loyalty and payments ecosystem. The Rakuten Points integration is particularly interesting - it creates a direct conversion path from loyalty points to a digital asset, which is a novel on-ramp that doesn’t require users to go near an exchange.
Watch for similar Rakuten Points/XRP promotions as they try to drive adoption of the new payment rail.
6. CoW Swap Hit by Security Breach - Users Warned to Stay Away
CoW Swap, the DEX aggregator, warned users to stay away from its site after a security breach. The team said it was working to resolve the issue.
No confirmed fund losses at time of writing. The “stay away from the site” advisory is the right call under uncertainty - better to pause usage than have users interact with potentially compromised contracts. The incident is a reminder that front-end attacks and smart contract exploits remain the dominant security vector in DeFi, regardless of protocol maturity.
7. Ethereum Foundation Launches $1M Audit Subsidy Program
The Ethereum Foundation announced a $1M program to subsidize smart contract security audits for builders. The initiative targets what it calls a persistent challenge in crypto development: the high cost of professional security audits, which can run $50K-$200K+ for complex protocols.
The audit cost problem is real. Many smaller protocols skip audits entirely because they can’t afford them, which is how you get the serial exploit pattern that’s defined DeFi’s history. A subsidy program doesn’t fully solve the problem, but it lowers the barrier for early-stage projects to get professional eyes on their code before launching.
This is the kind of ecosystem infrastructure investment that doesn’t generate headlines but compounds into fewer major hacks over time.
8. Tether Launches Multi-Chain Wallet with No Gas Tokens Required
Tether launched a crypto wallet that lets users send USDT, tokenized gold, and Bitcoin across multiple blockchains without needing gas tokens. The wallet handles fee abstraction internally.
Gas token friction has been one of the persistent UX blockers for stablecoin adoption - you can’t send USDT if you don’t also hold ETH or MATIC. Abstracting that away means users can hold only stablecoins and still transact freely. Combined with Tether’s scale ($140B+ USDT supply), this is a meaningful step toward mainstream usability.
9. Visa and Zodia Custody Join Stripe’s Blockchain for Machine Payments
Visa and Zodia Custody are now running validator nodes on Stripe’s new blockchain, which is designed for machine-to-machine payments. Visa configured and managed its node entirely in-house after six months of joint engineering work with Stripe’s Tempo team.
The framing of “machine payments” is the interesting part. This isn’t consumer payments - it’s infrastructure for AI agent billing, API micro-transactions, and automated settlement between services. Visa running a validator node means they’re deeply invested in this payment rail working, not just watching from the outside.
10. RIFT @riftai_ Day 23: Still 0 Posts
Day 23. Follower count holding at 41.7K - the bleed that was running at -100/day appears to have stopped.
Three weeks of silence from a Sequoia/a16z/Lightspeed-backed launch is unusual by any standard. The pressure to deliver a first post that justifies the hype is compounding daily. Still watching.
GitHub - Two Repos Worth a Look
1) forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills (TypeScript) - single CLAUDE.md that fixes Claude Code
Derived from Andrej Karpathy’s observations on LLM coding pitfalls, this is a single CLAUDE.md file that addresses the most common Claude Code failure patterns: over-explaining, touching working code, ignoring constraints, unsolicited refactors.
The 2026 stat that matters: 207K views on the original X thread, 6.4K bookmarks. That signal-to-noise ratio tells you how widely the “Claude keeps breaking things I didn’t ask it to touch” pain point resonates.
Snapshot: 32,279 stars (+9,230 today), TypeScript.
2) pascalorg/editor (TypeScript) - open source 3D architectural project editor
Create and share 3D architectural projects in the browser. Clean TypeScript implementation, no proprietary lock-in. As AI-generated design tooling matures, open-source 3D editors become the foundation layer everyone builds on top of.
Snapshot: 11,363 stars (+769 today), TypeScript.
Morning edition published ~06:00 HKT.
Evening Edition
Quantum cryptography dominated the afternoon. Two separate proposals to harden Bitcoin against quantum attacks, TRON going post-quantum on mainnet, and Nvidia saying quantum computers are closer than most think. Plus Kronos - a financial markets foundation model from Tsinghua that’s quietly become one of the most-starred AI repos in weeks.
11. Bitcoin Proposal to Freeze Satoshi’s Dormant Coins Against Quantum Threats
A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal would freeze all P2PK outputs - including Satoshi’s estimated 1.1 million BTC - to protect them from quantum attacks. Once quantum computers can break elliptic curve cryptography (which protects older key formats), coins sitting in exposed addresses become targets.
The proposal is politically loaded. Freezing coins that belong to anyone, including a presumed-dead Satoshi, cuts against Bitcoin’s property rights principles. But the alternative - quantum computers draining coins from dormant wallets and flooding markets with supply - is also catastrophic.
The debate is live now, not in 10 years. Google and Caltech/Oratomic both published papers last week warning the timeline is shorter than expected.
12. Ripple CEO Sees Crypto Regulatory Clarity “Very Close” After D.C. Meetings
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse spent the week in D.C. meeting with legislators and regulators. His read: crypto clarity is very close, with the stablecoin bill and market structure bill both within reach this congressional session.
Garlinghouse is optimistic but not naive - he’s been through the SEC lawsuit and knows how regulatory timelines slip. That said, the CLARITY Act is in Senate Banking markup this week, and at least one anonymous Senate source called it a “virtually done deal” last week. The signals are aligning.
13. TRON Deploys NIST-Standard Post-Quantum Signatures on Mainnet
TRON announced it’s deploying NIST-standard post-quantum cryptographic signatures on mainnet. NIST standardized these algorithms last year after an eight-year selection process - they’re the quantum-resistant primitives that governments and enterprises are migrating to.
TRON doing this now, while Bitcoin is still debating what to do with Satoshi’s coins, is notable. If quantum computing timelines are as compressed as Google and Caltech suggest, the chains that have already migrated their signature schemes will have a structural security advantage.
14. Nvidia: Quantum Computers Could “Unlock Discoveries We Can’t Reach Today”
Nvidia’s senior product manager for quantum computing software, Sam Stanwyck, said quantum computers could unlock drug discovery and better battery chemistry that classical computers can’t reach. This is Nvidia positioning for a post-GPU era while still in the middle of the GPU era.
The timing is deliberate - Nvidia’s quantum roadmap products are shipping in 2025-2026. They need the market to understand why quantum matters before they sell the hardware to build it. This is enterprise narrative-building, but the underlying science is sound.
15. Uniswap Labs Updates Gas Estimation to Cut Failed Transactions
Uniswap Labs shipped an update to gas estimation that reduces failed transactions across EVM chains. The improvement uses a more accurate simulation method for estimating gas costs before broadcasting transactions.
Failed transactions are one of the most persistent UX problems in DeFi - you lose the gas fee even when the trade doesn’t execute. Reducing the failure rate is unglamorous infrastructure work but it compounds into a meaningfully better user experience across millions of swaps per day.
16. Binance Research: Stablecoin Supply Up 11.5% YTD to $227 Billion
Binance Research published data showing total stablecoin supply grew 11.5% year-to-date to $227 billion. USDT still dominates at 62% market share, but USDC has gained ground.
$227B is a meaningful macro signal. Stablecoins are the liquidity reserve of crypto - when supply grows, it typically reflects capital waiting to deploy rather than capital that’s already moved into riskier assets. Combined with BTC clearing $75K and ETH rotation, there’s a lot of dry powder sitting on the sidelines.
17. Scroll Announces Layer 3 Scaling for ZK Proof Generation
Ethereum L2 Scroll announced a Layer 3 architecture for handling ZK proof generation at scale. The design offloads proof computation to a dedicated chain, reducing latency and cost for applications that need frequent proofs.
ZK proofs are computationally expensive - the bottleneck for many ZK rollup applications is proof generation time, not transaction throughput. Separating proof generation into its own dedicated chain is a logical architectural move that should enable faster finality for high-frequency applications.
18. Bybit Reports Zero Hacks in Q1 2026 After $1.5B Theft Recovery
Bybit published a Q1 2026 security report showing zero successful exploits across the quarter, following their February 2025 incident. The report details the operational changes they implemented: cold wallet verification protocol upgrades, enhanced multi-party signing, 24/7 security operations.
The context: Bybit lost $1.5B to the Lazarus Group in February 2025 in the largest crypto hack on record. Twelve months later, they’re posting clean security metrics and have recovered operationally. The recovery is meaningful both for Bybit’s reputation and as a data point that exchanges can come back from major incidents if the response is handled right.
19. Base Network Crosses 1 Million Daily Active Addresses
Coinbase’s Base network crossed 1 million daily active addresses, driven by activity in AI agent transactions and consumer social applications. Base has been the standout L2 performer in 2026, consistently posting higher user activity growth than competing chains.
The AI agent transactions component is new. Base is quietly becoming the preferred chain for agentic payments - automated micro-transactions between services - partly because Coinbase’s developer relations have been focused there, and partly because the fee structure suits high-frequency, low-value transactions.
20. RIFT @riftai_ Day 23 Evening Update: Still Nothing
23 days. 0 posts. Followers holding at 41.7K.
The silence is getting louder. Every day without a post is another day the mystery compounds - and another day the first post has to be extraordinary to justify the build-up. Still watching.
GitHub - Two More Worth a Look
1) microsoft/markitdown (Python) - convert any file to Markdown
109K stars and still climbing. Converts PDFs, Office docs, images, audio, and HTML to clean Markdown. The +1,675 today spike is driven by new support for audio transcription and improved table extraction.
For anyone building LLM pipelines that ingest real-world documents, this is the tool. Microsoft maintains it actively and the breadth of supported formats is unmatched.
Snapshot: 109,061 stars (+1,675 today), Python.
2) shiyu-coder/Kronos (Python) - foundation model for financial markets
Trained on 12 billion records across 45 exchanges, Kronos claims 93% better accuracy than leading time series models in zero-shot settings. Built at Tsinghua University, accepted at AAAI 2026, MIT licensed.
18K stars and growing fast. The skeptic’s question - how does it perform live vs. in backtests - is valid, but the open-source research alone is significant. Financial markets time series modeling at this scale hasn’t been done publicly before.
Snapshot: 18,021 stars (+963 today), Python.
Evening edition published ~18:00 HKT. Morning edition above covers the early stories.