Coindesk

Bitcoin and broader crypto markets were little changed in the past 24 hours with exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the asset attracting over $590 million in inflows on Monday, extending a six-day streak.

That marked a week of inflows for the first time since late March, coming as bitcoin’s appeal as a safe-haven asset continues to gain favor among investors. BlackRock’s IBIT led flows at $970 million, while Ark’s ARKB lost $200 million. BTC held above $94,000 in Asian morning hours on Tuesday, a resistance level whose break traders say could clear the path to a move toward $100,000.

XRP, ether (ETH), Cardano’s ADA and BNB Chain’s BNB remained flat, while Solana’s SOL was down 2%. Monero (XMR) dropped 8.5% after a sudden 40% surge on Monday, a move that came as a hacker swapped over $330 million of BTC to the privacy-focused token, per prominent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.

Among mid-caps, Nexo (NEXO) zoomed 8% after announcing it would return to the U.S. after a two-year regulatory hiatus with a focus on AI applications.

Some traders eye data releases in the week ahead for cues on positioning, with market sentiment generally dented after U.S. tariffs.

“Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have sustained gains made last week. Right now, traders are waiting for GDP, unemployment data, and a number of other economic data indicators set to be released in the US this week, so not much has changed yet,” Jeff Mei, COO at BTSE, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message.

“The US dollar continues to dip, as institutional investors diversify their holdings into other currencies. This could explain why demand for Bitcoin has been strong as well,” Mei added. The widely-tracked dollar index, a measure of the greenback against six global currencies, is down nearly 6% in the past month — its biggest fall since 2022.

Elsewhere, a correlation between bitcoin and an increase in M2 money supply is gaining traction among some traders. However, responses to viral online posts overlaying the two charts appear to be overblown in their eventual impact on prices.

M2 supply is the total amount of money in an economy, including cash, checking accounts, savings accounts, and other easily accessible funds. Bitcoin prices can rise if M2 increases because people may buy BTC to protect their wealth from inflation. Conversely, if M2 shrinks, bitcoin prices might drop since investors shy away from riskier bets.

“One of the recent and prevailing narratives suggests that BTC is about to break higher as a delayed reaction to the increase in M2 money supply,” Augustine Fan, head of insights at SignalPlus, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message.

“While we are not strict subscribers to this view as there are a lot more nuances behind the data, we are bullish on BTC in the medium term due to expectations of monetary and fiscal easing in response to tariff-driven slowdowns,” Fan added.

Bitcoin-friendly Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will no longer be a Member of Parliament after losing his seat in an election which saw Mark Carney’s Liberal Party secure enough seats to form at least a minority government.

Data from Elections Canada, reported by the CBC, shows Poilievre lost his Ottawa-area seat to Liberal Brunce Fanjoy on Monday night after a 5-week election cycle triggered by Carney, the current Prime Minister, last month.

Overall, the Liberal party took approximately 162 seats as of 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time, which is enough to form a minority government.

This is fewer than recent polls forecast, which projected that a Carney-led Liberal party would hit majority government territory — 172 seats — given the threats U.S. President Donald Trump made to the country’s sovereignty and the punitive tariffs the White House was directing northward.

However, CBC News noted as of midnight that votes were still coming in and it is not yet clear if the Liberals will win enough seats to form that majority government.

If present results stand under the U.K.-inspired Westminster system under which Canada operates, the Liberals would need the support of another opposition party, such as separatist-minded Bloc Quebecois, or the left-leaning New Democrat Party to pass bills in the House of Commons.

A Conservative-led non-confidence motion, should it have the support of another party, would be sufficient to trigger another election — though its far too early for this to be considered.

Unlike the United States, where crypto played an important role in moving the needle on winning Congressional races, and helping put Trump back in the White House, it seemed to be a muted affair in Canada.

While both Carney and Poilievre have discussed crypto in the past, the issue didn’t come up for either campaigns even though it was an important issue for many Conservative Members of Parliament.

On Polymarket, a contract asking bettors to predict the next Prime Minister of Canada crossed the $100 million mark (in U.S. dollars) in volume, and a dozen other election related questions had close to another $100 million in volume collectively.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell early in the U.S. trading session, but mostly held firm as poor macroeconomic news rolled in.

The top cryptocurrency late in the day was trading just below $95,000, up 0.5% over the past 24 hours. The CoinDesk 20 — an index of the top 20 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization excluding memecoins, exchange coins and stablecoins — was roughly flat over the same time frame.

Crypto stocks like Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR) and the miners were losing modest ground after big gains last week. Notable exceptions included Janover (JNVR) and DeFi Technologies (DFTF), ahead 24% and 6.5%, respectively even as SOL — the token which both companies are aggressively accumulating — fell about 3% during the U.S. day.

Meanwhile, gold rose almost 1% and the dollar index fell 0.6%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each peaked into the green late in the session after earlier dipping more than 1%.

The Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index, a typically little-noticed economic data point, plunged to -35.8 from -16.3 last month — much worse than analysts’ expectations of a -14.1 print and the worst performance since COVID upended the world economy.

“Pretty horrible Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey. Level hits the lowest since May 2020,” Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast, posted on X. “All the comments are about tariffs and policy uncertainty. Add it to the list of bad soft/survey data.”

Hostilities between India and Pakistan might also have added to market jitters, with Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif claiming that an Indian military incursion into Pakistan was imminent. Last week 26 people were killed in a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, a popular tourist destination in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The two countries have exchanged fire since.

Marco Santori, the former chief legal officer at Kraken, has joined Pantera Capital as a general partner on the investment team.

Santori, who stepped down from Kraken in January of 2025, will focus on expanding Pantera’s crypto portfolio, while acting as a resource for portfolio companies on regulatory compliance and strategic growth, according to a blogpost.

He will also continue his role in engaging with policymakers to advocate for clear, innovation-friendly regulations in the U.S. and globally, Pantera said.

The advancement of clear crypto regulations in the U.S. makes it an area of focus for firms readying themselves.

Sartori, who testified before the U.S. Congress on the subject of crypto regulation, is recognized for developing the “SAFT” (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) framework, a cornerstone of compliant token sales.

“I’m joining Pantera at a pivotal moment for crypto on the world stage. After over a decade of work, governments have finally embraced the benefits of blockchain technology,” Sartori said in a statement. “The timing couldn’t be better, and Pantera couldn’t be better positioned to capitalize on it.”

Tether’s gold-backed stablecoin, Tether Gold (XAUT), reached a $770 million market capitalization as of April 28, according to the company’s first attestation under El Salvador’s financial regulations.

“While central banks are stacking up hundreds of tons of gold, XAUt is set to become the standard tokenized gold product for the people and institutions,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino posted on X.

The token is backed 1:1 by 246,523.33 ounces — over 7.7 tons — of physical gold stored in a dedicated Swiss vault, said Tether.

Each XAUT token represents one troy ounce of LBMA-certified gold. Tether said it applies strict controls, including gold bar verification and periodic audits, to maintain trust in the token’s backing.

The attestation comes at a time when global investors are increasingly turning to gold as a hedge against economic instability and rising geopolitical risks.

Central banks, particularly across BRICS nations, have been buying gold at record levels, accumulating over 1,044 metric tons in 2024 alone, according to the World Gold Council.

The yellow metal has touched numerous record highs in 2025 amid an ongoing rally that’s seen its price gain about 27% year-to-date. It’s currently trading at $3,343 per ounce, having more than doubled since November 2022.

Tether emphasized that unlike other tokenized gold products, XAUT is physically backed and regulated, positioning it as a safer option for users wary of “paper gold” exposure.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

Bitcoin (BTC) miners’ first-quarter results may disappoint because the hashprice, a measure of daily mining profitability, fell further and trade tariffs weighed on the market, asset manager CoinShares (CS) said in a blog post on Friday.

“Q2 results may show deterioration, as tariffs on imported mining rigs range from 24% (Malaysia) to 54% (China),” analysts led by James Butterfill wrote.

Bitcoin miners that are dependent on older or less-efficient rigs are faced with higher exposure to these tariffs, the report said.

Core Scientific (CORZ) is “better insulated, as it transitions to HPC,” the authors wrote, adding that Bitdeer (BTDR), which makes its own rigs, could see margin pressure on sales outside the U.S.

The asset manager predicts that the Bitcoin network hashrate could reach 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s) by July and 2 ZH/s by early 2027.

The hashprice outlook is not as positive.

The asset manager’s model indicates “a gradual structural decline, with prices likely to remain range-bound between $35 and $50 per PH/day through to the 2028 halving cycle.”

Tariffs and trade tensions could be positive for bitcoin adoption in the medium term, asset manager Grayscale said in a research report earlier this month.

Read more: Bitcoin Miners With HPC Exposure Underperformed in First Two Weeks of April: JPMorgan

Mastercard is moving deeper into the digital asset economy by launching new global capabilities to support stablecoin payments across its vast merchant network, the company announced Monday.

The payments giant is working with crypto exchange OKX to roll out the “OKX Card,” aimed at linking crypto trading and Web3 activities with everyday spending. Meanwhile, merchants will soon be able to settle transactions directly in stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC, thanks to collaborations with Nuvei and Circle. Paxos will help extend this functionality to other supported stablecoins like USDP.

“When it comes to blockchain and digital assets, the benefits for mainstream use cases are clear,” Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said in a statement. “To realize its potential, we need to make it as easy for merchants to receive stablecoin payments and for consumers to use them. We believe in the potential of stablecoins to streamline payments and commerce across the value chain. Unlocking this is core to how we navigate the rapidly changing world, giving people and businesses the freedom they want by providing the choices they deserve,” he said.

Stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, have been gradually moving beyond trading venues into mainstream payments.

Mastercard’s initiative covers the full range of stablecoin use cases, from wallet enablement and card issuance to merchant settlement and on-chain remittances. The company has previously partnered with crypto exchanges like Kraken, Binance and Crypto.com to allow users to pay with stablecoins via traditional cards.

Last year, it rolled out Mastercard Crypto Credential, a service designed to simplify sending digital assets across borders using verified usernames rather than complex wallet addresses.

In 2023, Mastercard launched its Multi-Token Network (MTN) which is being leveraged to facilitate real-time settlements and redemptions of tokenized assets.

Ondo Finance, in February, became the first provider to bring real-world assets to the network.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

Did AI write the sentence that you’re reading right now? Did AI create the photograph you just saw online? Was the shocking, controversial story that tipped an election actually real, or AI-fueled misinformation?

These are questions Clara Tsao has wrestled with for years, ranging from protecting national security (where she was the CTO of a team focused on countering homegrown extremism) to creating a better internet, where she’s co-founder of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. (She also somehow finds time to be the President of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows and serve as Senior Advisor at Tech Against Terrorism.)

“For me, it’s always been about, how do we bring more democracy to the web, because it’s an open network that everyone should have the fundamental human right to access,” says Tsao, a Founding Officer at the Filecoin Foundation, and who will appear onstage at the AI Summit at Consensus 2025.

Tsao knows that AI, in a sense, is making all of these jobs harder. So Filecoin is focused on using blockchain to ensure digital authenticity and sniff out fakes. “AI is going to turbocharge everything that we see today, for good and for bad,” says Tsao. “And at the end of the day, I think everybody wants to know if they’re talking to an AI or to a human.”

Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How has AI complicated the mission for an open and trusted internet?

Clara Tsao: So one of the biggest risks with AI is, how can we tell if something is AI or bot-generated, versus something that we know might be a human in the loop. And when I was working on topics like countering foreign influence operations, how do you prove that a bad actor actually came from a country that we know might be trying to intervene with us?

Can you give an example?

There was a period, I think in 2016, when Facebook actually took down a bunch of media channels that came from Russia, because it was linked to the Internet Research Agency, which is a group that was definitely trying to push propaganda during the election. So it’s about being able to prove the source of information, and making sure that people are not falling victim to misinformation.

And fakes are getting easier and easier to create, thanks to AI…

Right. And with AI-generated images and AI-generated news, it could be easy for the very bad actors to use that technology for evil.

Can you connect the dots of how blockchain helps crack this problem?

One thing that’s great about decentralized technologies — and decentralized storage specifically — is you can actually prove how data is changed over the course of time, because we store every piece of data by hash, not by location.

So let’s say we have a data set, and we’re worried that maybe the data is being manipulated. Maybe a government is coming in and changing something so that it can fit their political agenda. There are many reasons why preserving information is more important than ever, and that’s something that we can absolutely do with Filecoin.

Who are you working with specifically?

We’ve worked with tons of amazing nonprofits over the years, like MuckRock, to make sure we can not only archive and preserve critical information, but also make sure it’s tamper-proof, make sure it’s resilient. For example, if it’s information that journalists pull from, that we can have resilient copies of it all around the world. We can also use that same technology to really prove that this journalist took a certain photo.

In certain elections, there might be disinformation about whether something actually happened or not, and you can have photographers use decentralized technologies. And we have a ton of applications of companies building on top of Filecoin today, that help verify this image was taken from this device at this point of time.

That’s really powerful in terms of not just day-to-day journalism, but also in being able to be admissible in courts. In Ukraine, there might be war photos that might be taken out of context. And we’re able to preserve a number of key photographs that can one day be admissible in international criminal courts for human rights situations.

How are you now thinking about Filecoin’s mission?

We can help verify if you’re talking to AI or a human. We can help store data at a fraction of the cost. We can make sure that data is more accurate, because most AI data-sets are built off training tons of data. And storing data is very expensive. So our goal is to make storing data affordable for everyone, and making sure that people are also pulling from as much data as possible, so AI agents aren’t only trained from a subset.

And finally, we can have a place where it’s not just monopolies being able to access tons of data. People can have a choice on where to store it, how to store it. So they’re not locked into a walled garden where they can never get out.

Love it. Thanks Clara. See you in Toronto at Consensus!

Jeff Wilser will host the AI Summit at Consensus 2025, and is host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast.

Political bettors on Polymarket and other platforms are paying attention to Canada as the nation heads to the polls.

As the country’s 45th election comes to a close, a contract asking bettors to predict who will be Canada’s next Prime Minister gives the Liberal Party’s Mark Carney a 78% chance, and the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre a 22% shot.

Political bettors are slightly more skeptical of Carney’s chances of winning than the polls, but both are pointing in the same direction. A poll aggregator from public broadcaster CBC puts Carney’s chances at 89%.

Myriad Markets, another prediction market, is giving Carney similar odds to Polymarket.

FanDuel, a licensed betting platform open only to residents of Ontario, Canada, initially gave the Conservatives a sharp, contrarian lead of 70%, according to a report from the National Post. Still, odds have fallen in line with prediction markets, and it now gives the Liberals a roughly 80% chance of winning.

Unlike the U.S. election, there isn’t a crypto angle up north with leaders’ campaigns focused on the trade war and inflation.

Too Big to Rig?

A growing narrative in certain corners of the internet is that Polymarket is prone to manipulation and its numbers aren’t reliable, criticisms that echo what was said in the last weeks of the U.S. election when the site gave Donald Trump a commanding lead as polls showed a tight race.

Critics say Poilievre’s chances are being suppressed and do not reflect the political sentiment of the populace.

However, manipulating prediction markets would be expensive, and there’s no credible evidence that this is happening even as Polymarket is banned in Canada’s largest province after a settlement with its securities regulator.

Data portal Polymarket Analytics shows that the Canadian election contract leads the platform in open interest, which is the total value of active, unsettled bets and a good measure of market engagement.

Market data also shows that position holding is quite distributed, with the largest holder of the Poilivere—No side of the contracting holding 6% of all shares and the largest holder of the Carney—Yes side holding 5%.

One bettor, who is betting big on Carney with a six-figure position, who spoke to CoinDesk, said their motives are non-partisan, and said that the quality of Canadian polling makes him confident that the Liberals will win.

“Poilievre needs a 7-point polling error to win and I think the probability of that is closer to 7% than his current market price of 23c,” trader Tenadome told CoinDesk via an X DM. “The pool of Poilievre bettors seems to largely be very dumb money that believes in things like China is rigging the polls.”

Currently, the trader with the largest winnings on the contract is “ball-sack” with a profit of $124,890, thanks to bets on Carney. On the other side of the trade is “biden4prez,” who lost just over $98,000 – the most out of any trader – betting on Poilievre and against Carney.

Read more: Previewing the Canadian Election’s Crypto Angle

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2800.9, up 1.3% (+34.92) since 4 p.m. ET on Friday.

Nine of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: XRP (+5.8%) and SUI (+5.2%).

Laggards: BCH (-6.2%) and UNI (-4.8%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.