Coindesk

The U.S. dollar index (DXY) has fallen below 100 and gold has surged to new all-time highs as escalating tariffs have heightened global economic uncertainty. Consequently, asset prices have taken a hit—most notably in the tech sector and cryptocurrencies.

Since reaching its all-time high of $109,000 in January, bitcoin (BTC) has declined approximately 26%. When compared to the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks, bitcoin’s drawdown sits right in the middle, signaling its growing maturity as an asset.

Tesla (TSLA) is currently the worst performer, down nearly 50% from its peak. NVIDIA (NVDA) follows with a 31% drop. Apple (AAPL), Bitcoin, Meta (META), Google (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN) have all declined around 26%, while Microsoft (MSFT) stands out with a relatively modest 18% drawdown.

To highlight bitcoin’s resilience in this current 3-month correction, is to compare it to a similar period during its 2021 downturn—from November 2021 to February 2022—when it plummeted 45% from $69,000 to $38,000. At that time, bitcoin was the worst performer among major tech names, though Tesla also suffered significantly.

This comparison underscores how bitcoin has grown more resilient over time as its market cycles progress and the asset continues to mature.

World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project backed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s family, has denied reports that it sold ether (ETH) earlier this week.

It was reported on Wednesday that a wallet closely linked to World Liberty Financial, which is tagged by blockchain data firm Arkham as potentially belonging to the project, sold $8 million worth of ether after surpassing $125 million in unrealized losses.

In a statement to CoinDesk, a World Liberty Financial spokesperson said: “The claims that World Liberty Financial has sold any of its holdings are wholly inaccurate. WLFI has not sold any positions as currently reported. Speculation to the contrary is false.”

Ether has since rebounded since that sale at $1,465, currently trading at $1,553 after the crypto markets experience a minor period of relief on Wednesday.

Donald Trump’s son, Eric, said that it was a “great time to buy” ETH in February when it traded at $2,880.

Arkham did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Remember when CryptoPunks were the ultimate flex?

The 10,000 avatars issued by Larva Labs back in 2017, were among the crown jewels of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze in 2021. Some NFTs of that collection fetched as high as $56 million worth of ether (ETH) on the open market in 2024.

The top five most expensive NFTs belong to the CryptoPunk collection, data from NFT analytics service CryptoSlam shows. But holders seem to be moving their money out.

The wallet behind CryptoPunks #3100, the third-highest NFT sale ever, sold their collectible earlier Friday for 4,000 ETH — a 500 ETH haircut worth over $10 million in dollar terms as ETH has itself dove nearly 60% in the past year.

That’s still a relatively high price for CryptoPunk compared to the collection’s floor price — or the minimum asking rate — of 42 ETH, or about $65,000, per CoinGecko. #3100’s value was driven by its rarity of being an “alien” (9 of 9985 punks) and wearing a hairband (406 of 9742 punks).

NFT trading volumes have been on a general decline since 2021, bar a few spikes amid frenzied periods. Overall sales dipped to just over $58 million as on April 7, reaching levels previously seen in early 2021.

Tokenized gold, such as Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’ PAXG continued to be a favorite of crypto investors in Asia as investors seek a safe haven despite a de-escalation in trade war tensions.

On-chain data shows that Tether’s XAUT was a top-10 market performer out of all digital assets. Tether’s tokenized gold, the largest by market cap, is up 3.4% in the last 24 hours.

CoinGecko data shows the sector is up 4.3% in the last 24 hours, compared to the CoinDesk 20, an index of the performance of the largest digital assets, which is down 2%.

The price of gold initially moved down during the early hours of the Asia trading day, after breaching an all-time high during the end of U.S. hours. It’s currently trading for $3218 in Hong Kong.

Equity markets in Asia showed mixed performance in the morning session, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng down 0.2%, Shanghai’s SSE up 0.12%, Taipei’s TAIEX up 1.6%, and Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 down 3.5%.

Gold typically rallies during periods of heightened economic or geopolitical uncertainty, as investors seek safety in assets seen as stores of value amid volatility. While trade tensions have calmed, investors are concerned about the lack of predictability in policy from the White House.

Gold also benefits from an inverse relationship with interest rates: lower rates reduce the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding gold, making it more attractive.

Investors are also concerned about the surging U.S. budget deficit.

China state media is also reporting that stimulus measures are in the works for the country, with interest rate cuts and government spending to the tune of $136 billion proposed.

Other market leaders include Curve DAO’s CRV, up 18% on-day after news that the U.S. plans to significantly relax rules and enforcement pertaining to Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

For years, Wall Street criticized bitcoin (BTC) for its volatility, but the situation has dramatically changed as President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policies diminish the appeal of U.S. assets.

Since Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement on April 2, the seven-day realized volatility of the S&P 500, Wall Street’s benchmark equity index, has surged from an annualized 50% to 169%, according to data from TradingView. That’s the highest level since the coronavirus crash in 2020.

BTC’s seven-day realized volatility has doubled to 83%, yet it remains significantly lower than the S&P 500, hinting at the cryptocurrency’s possible evolution as a low-beta hedge against stocks. The cryptocurrency also looks significantly less volatile than the S&P 500 on a 30-day basis.

“Equity markets [have] experienced a dramatic spike in volatility—surpassing that of Bitcoin, which is currently seeing a decline in volatility. This raises the question: should investors place their trust in assets that are highly susceptible to political influence and human error, or in a mathematical framework and emerging store of value that is more resilient to such risks?,” CoinShares’ Head of Research James Butterfill said in an email.

Investors dump U.S. assets

The S&P 500 has cracked 14% in less than two months, largely due to trade war fears that have recently come true. The tech-heavy Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average have suffered similar losses alongside increased volatility in global equity markets.

Risk aversion of such magnitudes has historically seen investors park money in Treasury notes, which underpin the global financial system, and the U.S. dollar, the global reserve currency.

But since last Friday, investors have aggressively dumped Treasury notes, driving yields higher, and the dollar index has tanked. The so-called benchmark 10-year bond yield has surged by 62 basis points to 4.45% since last Friday and the dollar index, which tracks the greenback’s value against major currencies, has extended its first quarter swoon to 100, the lowest level since late September.

Currencies typically appreciate when their national bond yields rise unless markets are worried about the country’s debt situation, in which case investors pull money out of the bond markets, leading to a spike in yields and a concurrent currency depreciation. The Global South witnessed this in 2018.

“Yields higher, currency lower is common in EM. We saw this in the UK during the Truss debacle. But it is highly abnormal for the US: there are only four other episodes in the last 30 years in which the dollar depreciated more than 1.5% with the 30-year yield up more than 10bp,” Evercore ISI said, according to Wall Street Journal’s Chief Economic Correspondent Nick Timaros.

“It reflects evaporating US growth exceptionalism and the reduced attraction at the margin of dollar assets for reserve purposes amid erratic US decision-making,” Evercore added.

Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have jointly requested a pause in their respective appeals to finalize a potential settlement, per a motion filed on Thursday.

The filing signals a possible end to a high-profile dispute that has gripped the payments upstart industry since December 2020 for its sale of XRP tokens, which the SEC alleged were unregistered securities.

The case has been a focal point for debates over the regulatory status of cryptocurrencies in the United States, with Ripple arguing that XRP is a currency, not a security, and thus outside the SEC’s jurisdiction.

Ripple and the SEC have reached an “agreement in principle” to resolve all outstanding issues, per a post shared by attorney James Filan.

This includes not only the SEC’s appeal of the district court’s final judgment but also Ripple’s cross-appeal and the claims against Ripple founders Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen.

The motion requests that the court hold the appeals process in abeyance — effectively pausing it — while the parties hammer out the final terms of the settlement, which still requires formal approval from the SEC’s commissioners.

This follows a similar request from the SEC and Gemini in early April, where the two parties requested the court approve a two-month pause to finalize a deal to close their long-running legal dispute over Gemini’s Earn program.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is under fire from Senate Democrats following his recent decision to narrow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) crypto enforcement priorities and disband its crypto enforcement squad.

In a Thursday letter to Blanche, six Senate Democrats — Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — blasted his decision to cut the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) as “giv[ing] a free pass to cryptocurrency money launderers.”

The Senators called Blanche’s directive that DOJ staff no longer pursue cases against crypto exchanges, mixers or offline wallets “for the acts of their end users” or bring criminal charges for regulatory violations in cases involving crypto, including violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), “nonsensical.”

“By abdicating DOJ’s responsibility to enforce federal criminal law when violations involve digital assets, you are suggesting that virtual currency exchanges, mixers, and other entities dealing in digital assets need not fulfill their [anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism] obligations, creating a systemic vulnerability in the digital assets sector,” the lawmakers wrote. “Drug traffickers, terrorists, fraudsters, and adversaries will exploit this vulnerability on a large scale.”

In his memo to DOJ staff on Monday evening, Blanche cited U.S. President Donald Trump’s January executive order on crypto, which promised to bring regulatory clarity to the crypto industry, as the reason for his decision.

“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote, adding that the agency will “no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”

Instead, Blanche urged DOJ staff to focus their enforcement efforts on prosecuting criminals who use “victimize digital asset investors” or those who use crypto in the furtherance of other criminal schemes, like organized crime, gang financing, and terrorism.

Read more: DOJ Axes Crypto Unit As Trump’s Regulatory Pullback Continues

For the Senate Democrats, however, Blanche’s claim doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

“You claim in your memo that DOJ will continue to prosecute those who use cryptocurrencies to perpetrate crimes. But allowing the entities that enable these crimes — such as cryptocurrency kiosk operators — to operate outside the federal regulatory framework without fear of prosecution will only result in more Americans being exploited,” the lawmakers wrote.

The lawmakers urged Blanche to reconsider his decision to dismantle NCET, calling it a “critical resource for state and local law enforcement who often lack the technical knowledge and skill to investigate cryptocurrency related crimes.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James raised similar concerns in her own letter to Congress on Thursday, urging lawmakers to pass federal legislation to regulate the crypto markets. Though her letter itself made no mention of Blanche’s memo or the shuttering of NCET, a press release from her office highlighted that her letter “comes after the [DOJ] announced the dismantling of federal criminal cryptocurrency fraud enforcement, making a robust regulatory framework all the more critical.”

With a signature from President Donald Trump, the decentralized financial (DeFi) corner of the crypto sector is now freed from U.S. Internal Revenue Service demands that such platforms be treated as brokers and required to track and report user activity.

That narrowly focused IRS rule, approved in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration, has been formally struck down, according to Representative Mike Carey, an Ohio Republican who backed the effort. And the agency is prevented from pursuing anything like it, according to the Congressional Review Act power used by lawmakers to get rid of the tax regulation.

Though the issue was relatively limited, its completion marks the first time a pro-crypto effort has cleared the U.S. Congress.

Both the Senate and House of Representatives agreed to reverse the IRS action with strong bipartisan showings, further underlining the crypto sector’s strength in this Congress. That could bode well for the industry’s chances with other more wide-ranging matters, including legislation to regulate stablecoin issuers and to set market rules for crypto transactions.

Trump’s signature on the DeFi tax resolution puts that concern for DeFi in the rearview. The next crypto priority in Congress has been stablecoin legislation. Similar bills have passed relevant committees in both the House and Senate and are awaiting floor votes in each chamber. Approvals would start a process to meld the two efforts into one compromise version.

The president has called for a bill to arrive on his desk by August, and the lawmakers behind the legislation have said such a timeline is still possible.

Nova Labs, the parent company behind the Helium blockchain, has agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $200,000 to settle civil securities fraud charges the regulator filed against the firm in January, a court filing said Thursday.

Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle accusations that it misled institutional investors during a funding round from late 2021 to early 2022, during which it raised $200 million in fresh capital at a $1 billion valuation. In its complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs of lying to prospective investors about a number of big-name enterprise customers — including Nestle, Salesforce and Lime — it claimed were using the Helium technology.

The SEC accused Nova Labs of repeatedly exaggerating the nature of its relationships with these three corporations in order to secure investments, touting them as customers and “users” of its tech. According to the complaint, Nova Labs’ actual contact with Lime, Salesforce and Nestle was limited and primarily occurred before the launch of the Helium network in mid-2019.

For example, according to the SEC, the extent of Nestle’s relationship with Nova Labs was a small-scale test of some of the company’s component hardware in its water-delivery business in 2018, before Nova Labs was even in the crypto business. Its relationship with scooter company Lime was limited to two in-person demonstrations of Nova Labs’ component hardware to an audience of just two Lime employees — at least one of whom left the company shortly afterwards —in early 2019, the SEC said.

Both Nestle and Lime eventually sent Nova Labs cease-and-desist orders, according to the SEC, threatening the company with legal action if it continued to use their trademarks and otherwise claiming to have an ongoing relationship with them, the complaint alleged.

As part of Nova Labs’ settlement agreement with the SEC, the regulator agreed to drop two other claims that the company violated federal securities laws, including through the sale of three of its tokens — the Helium Network Token (HNT), the Helium Mobile Network Token (MOBILE) and the Helium IoT Network Token (IOT) — which the SEC alleged in January to be securities, according the settlement agreement. Those claims were dropped with prejudice, meaning the SEC is barred from bringing a future case under the same allegations.

Nova Labs celebrated the settlement in a Thursday blog post, calling it a “major win for Helium and the People’s Network.”

“With this dismissal, we can now definitively say that all compatible Helium Hotspots and the distribution of HNT, IOT and MOBILE tokens through the Helium Network are not securities,” the blog post said. “The outcome establishes that selling hardware and distributing tokens for network growth does not automatically make them securities in the eyes of the SEC.”

The blog post made no mention of the $200,000 settlement or the claim that Nova Labs misled investors.

When reached for comment, Nova Labs Chief Legal Officer Sarah Aberg told CoinDesk that while the settlement agreement prohibits the company from either admitting or denying the claims, “we can point out that, both at the time of those statements and today, data usage on the Helium Network has always been publicly available.”

The settlement agreement, filed in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) on Thursday, is subject to approval by a federal judge.

Crypto companies issuing or dealing with tokens that may be securities should provide detailed disclosures, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Thursday.

The SEC published its latest staff statement on disclosures ahead of its second roundtable — which will focus on trading — “as part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets.”

The nonbinding guidance recommends companies filing disclosures be precise about what their businesses do and what role their tokens may play in those ventures. Much of it is based on observations about what companies have previously disclosed, the statement said. The statement did not delve deeply into which cryptocurrencies are being defined as securities or what definitive guidance on that issue may look like.

“These offerings and registrations may involve equity or debt securities of issuers whose operations relate to networks, applications, and/or crypto assets. These offerings and registrations also may relate to crypto assets offered as part of or subject to an investment contract (such a crypto asset, a ‘subject crypto asset’),” the statement said.

Many of the details include disclosures made by existing companies that the SEC said it observed, including whether the businesses are developing crypto or blockchain networks, their development milestones, what the network would be for and whether it was based on open source or other technology stacks.

Previous disclosures also include details like what rights token holders have and technical specifications, the statement said.

The statement said the Division of Corporation Finance was just providing its views ahead of the SEC’s new crypto task force’s work to more clearly define where its jurisdiction lies in the digital asset sector. A footnote, like previous staff statements, noted that the statement is not formal guidance or rulemaking and “has no legal force or effect.”

Previous staff statements issued under Acting Chair Mark Uyeda addressed stablecoins and memecoins.

Read more: SEC Staff to Reassess Biden-Era Crypto Guidance Amid Regulatory Shakeup