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The idea of “safe haven” assets—traditionally marked by gold and government bonds—amid market turmoil, is being tested like never before.

For decades, portfolio construction and risk management were simple: 60% equities, 40% bonds and when markets panicked, capital typically flowed into gold and government bonds. These assets were slow, steady, and predictable, making them an ideal safe haven for investors looking for protection against volatility. But in today’s world of 24/7 markets, geopolitical instability, and rising distrust in sovereign systems, have turned that logic on its head, asking the question: does the definition of a safe haven need a refresh?

Enter the new kid in the block: bitcoin.

It is highly volatile, widely misunderstood, and often dismissed as a speculative asset by many corners of Wall Street and Main Street. Yet, it has staged an extraordinary run since the COVID-19 market lows.

It’s up over 1,000% since the COVID-19 market crash in March 2020. During that same period, long-duration bonds—measured via iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT)—are down 50% from their 2020 highs. Even gold, the true and tried safe haven asset—up 90% over five years—looks less impressive when adjusted for monetary debasement, which saw, in 2020 alone, over 40% of the total USD money supply being printed.

Still, bitcoin’s safe haven credential remains contested by investors.

In several recent risk-off events, it acted less like a hedge and more like a high-beta risk asset against the Invesco QQQ Trust, Series 1 ETF.

Covid-19 (March 2020): BTC fell 40% vs QQQ’s 27%

Bank crisis (March 2023): BTC -14%, QQQ -7%

Yen carry trade unwind (Aug 2024): BTC -20%, QQQ -6%

Tariff-led selloff (April 2025): BTC -11%, QQQ -16%

The first three examples show bitcoin as a kind of leveraged tech trade. But the most recent tariff shock broke the pattern — bitcoin dropped less than the Nasdaq, showing relative strength in an otherwise weak macro environment spurred by President Trump’s tariffs.

While these data points may not make a trend, this evolving behavior highlights a broader phenomenon: the global financial backdrop has changed.

“Non-sovereign stores of value, like bitcoin, should do well,” said NYDIG Research in a note. “Politically neutral assets should be exempt from the global machinations at play right now.”

Bitcoin is volatile, yes, but it is also globally liquid, decentralized, censorship-resistant, and immune to tariffs or central bank policy. In an era of geopolitical tension and financial repression, those attributes start to make the asset look more enduring than other safe havens.

Meanwhile, traditional safe havens aren’t looking so safe. Gold’s gains look less impressive when weighed against the scale of monetary expansion. Long-duration bonds aren’t faring much better either as the 30-year treasury yield approaches 5%, making them painful for duration-heavy portfolios.

Since the sell-off began last Thursday, the Nasdaq has dropped nearly 10%, bitcoin is down 6%, TLT has fallen over 4%, and gold has slipped more than 3%. Meanwhile, the DXY index — which tracks the U.S. dollar against a basket of foreign currencies — remains relatively flat, while the all-important U.S. 10-year Treasury yield has surged nearly 8%.

On a risk-adjusted basis, bitcoin is holding its ground—performing no worse than traditional safe-haven assets like gold or TLT.

Looking at these four major crisis events, a pattern emerges: : each sell-off in bitcoin has marked a significant long-term bottom. During the COVID crash, BTC dropped to ~$4,000 — a level never seen again. In the March 2023 banking crisis, it briefly fell below $20,000 before resuming its climb. The August 2024 yen carry trade unwind brought it down to $49,000 — again, a level that hasn’t returned. If history is any guide, wherever this current low takes us, it may well establish the next long-term floor.

So, is Bitcoin a safe haven?

If the old framing — low volatility and downside protection during a panic — still holds, then BTC falls short.

But in a financial world dominated by sovereign risk, inflation, and constant policy uncertainty, bitcoin starts to look more like an asset that investors might need to consider for durability, neutrality and liquidity.

In this evolving landscape, maybe bitcoin isn’t failing the safe haven test. Maybe the old playbook of what safe haven is, needs to change.

A New York judge ruled Friday that the majority of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil securities fraud suit against crypto venture firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) and two of its executives can proceed to trial.

In 2023, James sued James sued DCG and its CEO Barry Silbert, DCG’s now-bankrupt lending arm Genesis Global Capital and its former CEO Michael Moro and crypto exchange Gemini, alleging that they worked together to cover up a gaping $1 billion hole in Genesis’ balance sheet caused by the wipe-out of Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) in 2022.

James said DCG and Genesis made “false assurances” on social media that DCG had absorbed Genesis’ losses from 3AC’s implosion when, in fact, they had just papered over the hole with a promissory note, pleading to pay Genesis $1.1 billion over 10 years at a 1% interest rate. While DCG has adamantly maintained that the promissory note was legitimate, James’ suit claimed that DCG has “never made a single payment under the Note.”

While Gemini and Genesis both settled with the OAG, DCG, Silbert and Moro have fought them tooth and nail. Last spring, DCG and both executives filed motions to dismiss the suit, alleging that the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) had failed to state a claim — essentially arguing that they were not selling securities and thus should not be sued under New York State securities laws.

But the judge presiding over the case disagreed in her Friday ruling, writing that the OAG had, at least at the current stage of the case, adequately alleged that the Gemini Earn program — the now-defunct Gemini lending product that went belly-up in November 2022 and which sits at the center of James’ case — was a security.

Crane did, however, agree to toss out two of James’ claims against DCG, Moro and Silbert — one claim under New York’s Executive Law that they engaged in a scheme to defraud in the first degree, and another that they engaged in a conspiracy in the fifth degree — ruling that those claims were duplicative.

Though Crane ruled the case can proceed, DCG said it isn’t done fighting.

“As we have stated from the beginning, the allegations against DCG are a thin web of innuendo, mischaracterizations, and unsupported conclusions,” a spokesperson for DCG told CoinDesk. “We’re encouraged by the judge’s dismissal of the New York Attorney General’s most outrageous claims based on alleged violations of criminal fraud and conspiracy statutes. We will continue to fight this baseless lawsuit as we remain focused on our mission in support of the digital assets industry.”

Attorneys for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance asked a federal judge on Friday to continue a pause in the regulator’s case against the crypto exchange for another two months, citing “productive discussions.”

The SEC sued Binance in 2023, alleging the exchange — alongside its U.S. affiliate and executives such as former CEO Changpeng Zhao — violated federal securities laws by operating as an unlicensed clearing agency, broker and exchange. The SEC also alleged commingling and that Binance.US’s trading volume was manipulated. In February, after U.S. President Donald Trump retook office and appointed Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting agency chair, the regulator asked for a 60-day pause in the case, which was set to expire on Monday. The SEC pointed to a newly created crypto task force aiming to draft clearer guidance around how securities law might apply to digital assets as part of its explanation for the requested pause.

In Friday’s filing, the attorneys involved said the discussions included “how the efforts of the crypto task force may impact the SEC’s claims,” and requested another 60 days’ pause.

“In light of these continued discussions and the time required for the staff to seek authorization from the Commission as necessary to approve any resolution or changes to the scope of this litigation, the SEC requested that the Defendants agree to continue the current stay for an additional 60 days, and the Defendants agreed that continuing the stay is appropriate and in the interest of judicial economy,” the filing said.

Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

Trump’s on-again, off-again import levies dominated the week. At the beginning, tariffs sent stocks and crypto appreciably lower. By the end, with all new non-China tariffs paused for 90 days, markets were up again.

Bitcoin returned to a level ($82,000) that it was at this time last week. And analysts debated whether, in the panic of the previous days, it showed “safe haven” qualities (like gold) or whether it was a risk-asset like many others. The consensus was that bitcoin performed resiliently rather than completely reassuringly.

Our Asia reporting team led the way on our markets coverage. Omkar Godbole started the week strong by revealing how the unwinding of the “basis trade” could impact bitcoin price. Sam Reynolds wrote on how Kalshi was set to win its legal battle in Nevada, hours before the prediction market got its first victory in the state. Shaurya Malwa reported on the first XRP ETF listing in the U.S. and how Teucrium’s leveraged fund received $5m during its first day of trading.

From our European team, there was some timely analysis from James Van Straten, and the All-Important U.S. 10-Year Yield Moving in the Wrong Direction for Trump, and a story showing the resilience of the decentralized economy from Oliver Knight, How DeFi ‘Defied’ Market Carnage as Traders Poured Millions Amid Panic. Our coverage expanded beyond just tariffs and market reactions, with Jamie Crawley’s scoop, Rootstock Prepares to Release SDKs for Bitcoin Layer 2s Using BitVMX after he took the opportunity offered by an embargoed press release to phone the company and interview the founder. And there was a nice DeFi follow-up on the repercussions of HyperLiquid’s price manipulation exploit from March by Oliver, How the Hype for HyperLiquid’s Vault Evaporated on Concerns Over Centralization.

Meanwhile, there was lots of news that wasn’t tariff-related.

Paul Atkins was confirmed as the new SEC chair. The Department of Justice closed down its crypto enforcement unit, prompting criticism, from Democrats and others, that it’s not serious about combating malfeasance. The SEC approved ETH ETF options, following a long delay. And President Trump put an end to a controversial DeFi accounting rule.

It was a week that showed how crypto was increasingly central to finance and even macro-economics. Fun times are ahead. 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could consider a short-term crypto oversight framework to allow firms to keep innovating while the agency works out a more permanent answer to digital assets regulation, interim Chairman Mark Uyeda suggested during a Friday event at the agency’s Washington headquarters.

“We should consider whether there may be a more efficient method of regulation under an accommodating federal regulatory framework,” said Uyeda, in a recorded statement played at the agency’s latest crypto industry roundtable. “While the Commission works to develop a long term solution to address these issues, a time-limited, conditional exempt relief framework for registrants and non-registrants could allow for greater innovation with blockchain technology within the United States in the near term.”

The securities regulator is waiting for Congress to deliver a crypto market-structure law that will allow it to start writing the rules that the digital assets sector has been clamoring for. That may happen as soon as later this year, according to the lawmakers working on that effort, but months will pass before its arrival and even longer for the SEC and other relevant federal agencies to write regulations and put them in motion.

During this second in a series of crypto roundtables the agency hosted as it overhauls its digital assets stance, Uyeda was still running the agency, though the incoming chairman, Paul Atkins, is poised to take over. Once he arrives, though, Uyeda and fellow Republican Commissioner Hester Peirce, a crypto advocate, will still be on board.

The Republican commissioners noted crypto platforms’ interest in handling both traditionally SEC-regulated activity and business outside the agency’s scope, all under the same roof.

“What can and should we do in the short term, and what should Congress consider in the longer term to ensure that the regulatory gaps are filled as firms increasingly seek to combine securities and non-securities trading activity?” asked Peirce, who leads the SEC Crypto Task Force.

The SEC’s sole Democratic commissioner, Caroline Crenshaw, argued that some of the market disruptions and company failures in the recent past have forced industry observers to become “painfully aware of the mismatch between investors expectations and reality.”

“Crypto trading platforms are unique because, among other reasons, they often perform multiple services under one roof, sometimes including bridge clearing and custody,” said Crenshaw. In traditional finance, those kinds of functions are “typically performed by separate registered entities,” because they come with a “high risk of conflicts of interest and risks for investors.”

Read More: SEC ‘Earnest’ About Finding Workable Crypto Policy, Commissioners Say at Roundtable

Traditional U.S. assets are going haywire as U.S.-China trade tensions continue to rattle global markets, now coupled with fresh data of tumbling sentiment towards the U.S. economy and mounting inflation concerns.

The most recent University of Michigan survey, published on Friday, found that consumer sentiment fell to 50.8 from 57.0, nearing the most depressed level in three years and far below that seen during the 2020 Covid shutdowns. Year-ahead inflation expectations surged to 6.7%, up from 5% in the prior month and the highest read since 1981.

On the back of the data, investors resumed selling long-term U.S. government bonds and the greenbacks, two assets traditionally considered as safe havens. The 10-year Treasury yield soared above 4.55% during U.S. morning hours, up more than 50 basis points in just a week. Meanwhile the dollar index (DXY) sank below 100 to a three-year low. Gold, meanwhile, hit a fresh record of $3,240 per ounce.

After a wildly volatile past few sessions, U.S. stocks were trading in a far tighter range on both sides of unchanged on Friday. At press time, the Nasdaq was higher by 0.6%

Meanwhile, cryptocurrency markets were moving higher, with bitcoin (BTC) holding just above $82,000, gaining 4% over the past 24 hours. The broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index was up 3%, with altcoin majors Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX leading with 6% gains.

Signal or noise?

While some macroeconomic analysts are fearful that the recent surge in government bond yields is threatening the future outlook of the U.S. economy, others believe investors are reading too much into short-term market swings.

“U.S. dollars and U.S. government debt, two of the market’s most liquid safe haven categories, are going haywire,” Noelle Achison, analyst and author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, said in a Friday note. “This is not the case for other safe havens, however, just those directly tied to the U.S.”

“I believe that it is much more likely that recent sharp moves in these asset classes is due to highly leveraged market participants being forced out of positions than due to fundamentals,” said billionaire investor Bill Ackmann in a post on X.

“Technical factors are driving the dramatic market moves,” Ackman continued. “As a result, markets have become increasingly unreliable as short-term indicators of the impact of policy changes.”

When the U.S. government sanctioned the Ethereum-based crypto mixing service Tornado Cash in 2022, it ignited a debate within the crypto community that continues three years later.

Tornado enabled users to transfer crypto anonymously. The government contended that the service facilitated money laundering, prompting some of Ethereum’s validators and block builders to take steps to avoid engaging with Tornado-linked transactions, which made the service slower and costlier to use.

Advocates argued that complying with the sanctions amounted to censorship — undermining a fundamental cypherpunk principle. President Donald Trump supported the cypherpunks and lifted the sanctions on Tornado Cash in March of this year, but for some Ethereum developers, the situation highlighted a flaw within the network that still exists today: Why should users depend on third-party apps to transact privately on the network?

“Publicly accessible transaction graphs allow anyone to trace the flow of funds between accounts, and balances are visible to all participants in the network, undermining financial privacy,” crypto security researcher Pascal Caversaccio explained in a blog post on Wednesday. “While the Ethereum network’s transparency fosters trustlessness, it also opens the door to potential surveillance, targeting, and exploitation.”

Perhaps emboldened by the recent Tornado Cash developments, Ethereum developers and researchers have once again begun discussing ideas for making the Ethereum network private at its core.

“Privacy must not be an optional feature that users must consciously enable — it must be the default state of the network,” said Caversaccio, whose post outlined his vision for a privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap. “Ethereum’s architecture must be designed to ensure that users are private by default, not by exception.”

Caversaccio’s post identified several potential interventions — some new, some old — that could, according to him, would make Ethereum more private for end-users. One idea is to encrypt Ethereum’s public mempool — where transactions are sent before they’re recorded permanently. Another involves making Ethereum transactions confidential through zero-knowledge cryptography, new transaction formats, and other methods.

“Today, Ethereum operates in a partial, opt-in privacy model, where users must take deliberate steps to conceal their financial activities — often at the cost of usability, accessibility, and even effectiveness,” wrote Caversaccio. “This paradigm must shift. Privacy-preserving technologies should be deeply integrated at the protocol level, allowing transactions, smart contracts, and network interactions to be inherently confidential.”

In response to Caversaccio’s post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin left a comment on the network’s main developer forum with his own much shorter privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap.

Buterin suggested focusing on privacy for on-chain payments, anonymizing on-chain activity within applications, making communication on the network anonymous, and privatizing on-chain reads.

To achieve all of this, Buterin listed various steps like integrating certain third-party privacy features into the core network.

One of the more substantial interventions suggested by Buterin involves moving the network towards a “one address per application” model — a departure from today’s system, where a single application may employ dozens of wallets for different features. “This is a major step, and it entails significant convenience sacrifices, but IMO this is a bullet that we should bite, because this is the most practical way to remove public links between all of your activity across different applications,” Buterin wrote.

According to Buterin, if all of his suggestions are implemented, private transactions could be the default on Ethereum.

The privacy discussion comes a few weeks before Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Pectra, which doesn’t have a major focus on privacy. Ethereum developers are also currently planning the network’s following upgrade to Fusaka. The changes to be included in that hard fork are not yet set in stone.

Read more: Vitalik Buterin Disappointed With Embrace of Blockchain “Casinos”

The complex pipes that keep derivatives trades moving are about to get a major efficiency boost in DeFi, according to Crypto Valley Exchange.

Crypto Valley Exchange’s “smart clearing” protocol will lower the capital requirements for derivatives traders by setting collateral levels in light of the traded assets’ correlations in price. In doing so, it could make DeFi more competitive with the mainstream financial markets crypto trying to replace, according to CEO James Davies.

The service is a new take on an age-old problem in DeFi: how to sufficiently mitigate counterparty risk in a trustless environment.

Traditional financial markets like CME and NYMEX rely on clearinghouses to be a trusted counterparty for every buyer and seller. They demand some collateral, but hardly 100%. DeFi markets, meanwhile, definitely lack a trusted middleman, and so can’t afford to require anything less than full collateral.

This system works, but hardly well. More collateral requirements means traders have less capital to deploy elsewhere. Davies claims this severely limits the market’s growth.

“This is the one place where all of crypto is much more conservative than TradFi,” Davies said. “We’re really, really undersized in this space, and that’s because clearing is needed to create this efficiency.”

He pointed to the seeming lunacy of requiring full margin for trades involving highly correlated assets, like forms of oil.

“If I was to go to, say [commodities exchange] NYMEX as an oil company and want to buy oil and sell jet fuel, and you asked me to put down full margin on both parts, I’d laugh at you, because those things are 90% correlated,” Davies said.

He believes the same logic should apply in DeFi. “Ethereum isn’t going to 10,000 on the day Solana goes to zero,” he said. Because of the correlation, a trader betting that ETH will rise relative to SOL shouldn’t need to post full collateral.

In his telling, clearing is the missing piece in DeFi’s effort to gobble up traditional finance. If protocols gain an ability to better manage the risk, and also do so transparently, on a blockchain, so that everyone can see what’s happening and how, then they’ll become competitive with the financial rails they’re trying to replace.

“You can’t just build a perps DeFi platform for, say, treasuries or commodities, go up against NYMEX or go up against CME, and expect to win when you have to lock up so much more collateral than you would do to trade on those platforms.” Davies said.

If crypto’s real-world asset (RWA) subsector delivers on its promise of bringing tokenized versions of everything on-chain then, according to Davies, DeFi will need a solution to the clearing efficiency problem such as this. Institutional investors won’t put up with requirements for triple the collateral capital they’re used to – especially on correlated trades, he said.

The first user is Crypto Valley Exchange itself. Already, the Arbitrum-based futures and options DEX is running dated futures orders through its smart clearing. More capabilities are coming later this year to support commodities markets beyond crypto, and Davies hopes for other protocols to plug into smart clearing, too.

Onyxcoin (XCN), the native token of its namesake’s modular blockchain, experienced a major boost over the past 48 hours, bucking the bearish market sentiment with a 150% rise.

Daily trading volume averaged around $25 million earlier this week until the token started to rip through levels of resistance. That figure has now ballooned to $600 million, the majority of which took place on Coinbase.

The surge in volume and apparent lack of visible catalyst prompted Binance to list XCN futures on its exchange on Friday.

Unlike many other Binance listing announcements, the listing did not spur an additional increase in token price, which could indicate that some investors opted to “sell the news,” creating a type of equilibrium between new buyers and old sellers.

In no surprise given the lame crypto price action in the first quarter of 2025, BlackRock (BLK) posted a sizable slump in net inflows into its spot bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) ETFs.

In all, investors put $3 billion into BlackRock’s digital asset-focused ETFs in the first three months of the year, according to the company’s first quarter earning report. That’s an 83% drop from what was a big inflow number in the fourth quarter as prices and sentiment shot higher alongside the Trump election victory.

Taken alone, the first quarter number still signals strong demand for crypto-linked funds, even as prices deteriorated.

That $3 billion represents 2.8% of the total inflows into BlackRock’s mammoth iShares ETFs in the first quarter, which also include active, core equity, and strategic funds, among smaller categories. BlackRock at quarter’s end managed roughly $50.3 billion in digital assets, or about 0.5% of its total assets of more than $10 trillion.

Digital asset ETFs accounted for $34 million in base fees, or less than 1% of the company’s long-term revenue.

The decline in bitcoin and ether ETF inflows last quarter came alongside a 70% quarterly fall in iShares’ overall inflows to $84 billion from $281 million as global markets attempted to navigate the changing macroeconomic environment under President Trump.