Coindesk

Bitcoin (BTC) rose to nearly $82,000 early Thursday to usher gains across the crypto market after a U-turn on tariffs led to relief in broader equity markets on Wednesday, prompted by President Donald Trump changing course on a steep tariff levy globally.

XRP and ether (ETH) led gains among crypto majors with a 12% surge, while Cardano’s ADA, BNB Chain’s BNB, Solana’s SOL and dogecoin (DOGE) zoomed as much as 10%. Overall market capitalization rose 6%. The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20) showed a 7% increase.

Crypto-tracked futures showed short liquidations of over $350 million, the highest since early March, which helped ease losses from Monday and Tuesday as bitcoin dove to nearly $75,000 at one point.

Such liquidation events often present a market buying opportunity, as CoinDesk noted on Monday, as they can signal an overstretched market that indicates a price correction has occurred, among other factors.

Elsewhere, Bittensor’s TAO, Sonic’s S and Flare’s FLARE were up as much as 30% to lead gains among midcaps, or tokens below a $5 billion market cap.

Thursday’s jump came as Trump paused higher tariffs on all countries, except China, where he increased the levy to 125%, amid mounting concerns from global leaders and recession fears. Countries that were hit with the higher, reciprocal duties that went into effect Wednesday will now be taxed at the earlier 10% baseline rate applied to other nations.

U.S. stocks staged their best rally since 2008. The S&P 500 Index soared 9.5%, rebounding from bear-market territory, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 surged 12%.

As such, traders continue to watch developments for cues on positioning amid the uncertainty.

“The market is rallying in response to anticipation that most trading partners will negotiate trade deals with the US, avoiding a full-fledged trade war,” Jeff Mei, COO at BTSE, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “That being said, continued tariffs against China and vice versa will lead to a realignment of global trade that could drastically change how the world operates. We remain cautious until we see the consequences of this play out over the coming months.”

Jupiter Zheng, partner at HashKey Capital, signalled a possibility of markets reaching a local bottom.

“The upswing was fueled by optimism that the worst may be behind us. While potential headwinds remain, such as retaliatory tariffs from China in response to Trump’s 125% increase, the start of negotiations with other countries offers some hope,” he said in an email.

“As US regulators continue to streamline regulatory hurdles and implement more favorable policies, it’s possible that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have reached a bottom, assuming no unexpected surprises emerge. The industry may not have fully priced in these developments, leaving room for potential growth,” Zheng added.

Remember the old days when calling or sending a message via text outside the country cost money? With the help of modern messaging apps like WhatsApp, paying for cross-border calls and texts is now obsolete.

For money transfers, stablecoins might do just that: democratize the payments industry by eliminating historical gatekeepers, says venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

“Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers,” the firm said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The current global payment infrastructure is a complex web involving points of sale, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchanges, and card networks.

Read more: What Is a Stablecoin?

To make matters more difficult, each of these intermediaries charges fees and introduces delays, making international transactions cumbersome. For instance, a16z says remittance fees can reach up to 10% — just like cross-border calls or text used to be restrictive before instant messaging apps came into play.

Enter blockchain and stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar.

“Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of stitching together clunky, costly, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on top of global blockchains,” the blog post said.

“Already, stablecoins are slashing the cost of remittances: Sending $200 from the U.S. to Columbia using traditional methods will cost you $12.13; with stablecoins, it costs $0.01.”

And, it’s not just remittances where stablecoins are eliminating inefficiencies; this could help boost B2B payments on a massive scale, too. A16z uses business transactions from Mexico to Vietnam as an example, which take three to seven days to process and cost anywhere between $14-to-$150 per $1000 transacted. These pass through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of which takes a cut.

The adoption of stablecoin could make such transactions nearly free and instant, it says.

Some corporations have taken notice, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is already using stablecoins to manage their corporate treasuries to shield itself from FX volatility.

So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see that the total market cap of stablecoins has passed $200 billion or that the annualized transaction value of stablecoins in 2024 hit $15.6 trillion — roughly 119% and 200% that of Visa and Mastercard, respectively.

However, the rise of stablecoins isn’t without challenges.

Regulatory bodies have scrutinized their use, making it “incredibly difficult” to bridge traditional finance to stablecoins, said a16z. The landscape is now finally evolving, as policymakers are now actively shaping rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in the U.S. “A forthcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for even broader adoption and integration into the global financial system,” the blog said.

With the rapidly changing landscape for finance and crypto becoming more mainstream, stablecoins could become the transformative force that revolutionizes the future of money.

“Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers,” added a16z.

Read more: U.S. House Committee Advances Stablecoin Bill, While Dems Warn of Trump Conflicts

Paul Atkins is just one oath away from taking over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee the nation’s securities sector — including whatever role the crypto sector plays in that.

A swearing-in ceremony will soon put the former SEC commission in charge of the high-profile regulator — a matter cheered on by the digital assets sector that sees him as a strong ally after his significant background advising crypto firms as a financial-services consultant in Washington. Atkins’ Senate confirmation was easily cleared on Wednesday in a 52-44 vote.

The longtime figure in U.S. financial policy — both in government and as an outside adviser — was generally expected to easily move through confirmation, though the Senate Banking Committee approved Atkins along party lines, with all the panel’s Democrats opposing the nominee.

Atkins’ confirmation took the usual months to emerge from the Senate, and in the time between the departure of predecessor Gary Gensler and Atkins’ arrival, Trump’s interim agency chief, Mark Uyeda, carried out an ambitious and rapidly deployed crypto overhaul. The SEC has thrown out almost all of its high-profile digital assets enforcement actions, and its staff quickly outlined a number of segments of the industry that it considers outside its jurisdiction — including some stablecoins, memecoins (such as the president’s own $TRUMP) and proof-of-work mining.

Many of the areas in which the agency has already demonstrated policy shifts overlap with Trump’s family crypto businesses, including the family’s memecoins and its ties to World Liberty Financial, which has pursued its own stablecoin. Atkins will be taking over those issues to apply permanent standards, potentially directed by future legislation that’s now a priority in Congress.

Atkins’ tenure will begin with an incomplete commission, which is meant to have five members and whose sole Democrat — Caroline Crenshaw — is occupying an already expired term. The White House hasn’t yet moved to fill the two Democratic positions on the commission.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave the green light for the trading of options tied to ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

On Wednesday, the regulator approved a filing from Nasdaq ISE, filed last July, which asked to list options contracts on the BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA). Options are a popular trading vehicle to leverage and hedge risk and are especially attractive to institutional investors who are looking to control large amounts of shares.

The Commission had until today to make a decision. James Seyffart, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the approval was “100% expected.”

The options apply specifically to ETHA, meaning that BlackRock’s product is the only spot ether ETF that options can be traded on.

Other funds are listed on the New York Stock Exchange’s Arca and Cboe.

Ukraine’s top financial regulator is floating the idea of taxing cryptocurrency as personal income, with possible carveouts for certain foreign asset-backed stablecoins, under a newly proposed taxation matrix published on Tuesday.

In a translated letter introducing the potential new approach, Ruslan Magomedov, head of Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission, said that effective tax policy is a necessary step in preventing financial abuse and facilitating the “legal and responsible use of digital assets.”

“Establishing fair and understandable taxation rules is also a prerequisite for attracting investment and integrating the Ukrainian virtual asset market into the global financial market,” Magomedov added.

Under the NSSMC’s suggested tax scheme, certain crypto transactions — essentially those in which non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies are cashed out for fiat currency or exchanged for goods or services, and during which there were no financial losses from the transaction — would be taxed at Ukraine’s standard personal income tax rate of 18%, plus the additional 5% wartime levy that went into effect last December.

Crypto-to-crypto transactions would not be subject to taxation under the proposed tax matrix, which is in line with how several other European countries including Austria and France, as well as crypto-friendly jurisdictions like Singapore, handle crypto taxation.

Because Ukraine’s tax code exempts any income generated from transactions with foreign exchange values from being taxed, the NSSMC suggested “it makes sense to consider a preferential rate or exemption from taxation” for foreign asset-backed stablecoins and certain asset-referenced tokens (ARTs). The suggested preferential tax rate under the matrix could be either 5% or 9%.

The matrix also offered a variety of taxation options for other types of crypto transactions, including mining, which the NSSMC suggested could be considered a “business activity”; staking, which the regulator said could either be “considered as business captive income” or taxed only at the cash-out stage; as well as hard-forks and airdrops, which the regulator said could either be taxed as ordinary income or only at the cash-out stage.

Ukraine had previously introduced a draft law similarly amending the country’s tax code to cover cryptocurrency in 2023. A 2024 analysis from Swiss blockchain analytics firm Global Ledger found that Ukraine could stand to collect over $200 million in annual taxes from crypto transactions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky officially legalized the country’s cryptocurrency sector in 2022, determining the industry’s regulators and giving them the go-ahead to create specific regulations. The National Bank of Ukraine is currently working on a draft law based on the European Union’s (EU) Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation.

Ukraine has been a candidate for EU membership since 2022.

CoinDesk reached out to the NSSMC for a comment.

Under far heavier pressure than the rather modest decline in bitcoin (BTC) over the past few days would suggest, crypto stocks are posting outsized gains as markets surge higher on the Trump tariff pause.

Among the movers are Strategy (MSTR), which rose 25%, while Coinbase (COIN) climbed 21%. Marathon Digital (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) were among the bitcoin miners posting gains in the teens.

Other movers included Semler Scientific (SMLR) and Fold (FLD), with advances closer to 10%.

The strong uptick was in line with the big move in other U.S. stocks — the Nasdaq rocketing more than 10% higher and the S&P 500 8%.

Bitcoin climbed above $82,000, up more than 6% over the past 24 hours.

The big gains come after a panicky few days in markets that nearly turned into a free fall on Monday and again overnight following President Trump’s punitive tariff plan announced last Wednesday.

“I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE,” said the president in a Truth Social posting midday today that set off the major rally.

The Trump administration’s friendliness toward the crypto sector is going to deeply change the bitcoin (BTC) lending market over the next four years.

That’s according to Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn, a firm that specializes in providing digital asset loans.

“You’re going to see a Cambrian explosion of bitcoin-backed loans, because the rates are going to drop to a point that is going to make them competitive with home equity or personal lines of credit, or other types of instruments,” Di Bartolomeo told CoinDesk in an interview.

The kicker, he said, is that these rates will drop not just in the U.S. but for countries all around the globe, thanks to bitcoin’s nature as a digital asset. “Gold in a vault in Switzerland is not gold in a vault in Venezuela, but bitcoin in Colombia is bitcoin in Madrid is bitcoin anywhere in the world. As an underwriter, I have uniform collateral,” Di Bartolomeo said.

In practice, this means that investors from developing countries, who may not have the same kind of efficient financing opportunities as people in Western nations, will soon have a way to access what Di Bartolomeo called world-class financing at fair rates.

That’s because big banks are finally ready to wade into crypto lending, now that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has rescinded SAB 121, a controversial accounting rule that made it prohibitive for firms to custody crypto assets.

Historically, very few players have offered crypto lending services in the U.S., which has made the space relatively uncompetitive, according to Di Bartolomeo.

“It’s a seller’s market right now. We are lending out dollars fully collateralized at north of 12.5%, with zero losses over seven years. Banks are going to look at this and say ‘Wow, this is a great rate of return.’ One bank will come in with 12% interest. Another will do 10%. Another says 9%. So this is going to compress, and compress,” he said. “It will really benefit the consumer.”

Lending bitcoin

Born and raised in Venezuela, Di Bartolomeo entered the crypto sphere in 2014. Back then, the country was reeling from hyperinflation and Nicolás Maduro’s ascent to power. While most of Di Bartolomeo’s friends were focused on emigrating, his brother was benefitting from bitcoin mining thanks to the nation’s cheap energy.

The family got in on the business, then other acquaintances, but they were confronted with the issue of financing their operations — a single mining rig can cost thousands of dollars. Bitcoin miners residing in Canada also had the same issue, Di Bartolomeo (who studied in Ontario) discovered. That’s what pushed him to launch Ledn in 2018 with co-founder Adam Reeds.

“Miners had fees and expenses, and their revenue was in bitcoin. They wanted to keep a lot of their treasury as bitcoin, because of how well it was doing. They needed a tool that helped them keep their bitcoin while giving them the fiat they needed to pay things out,” Di Bartolomeo said.

Fast forward to 2025 and Ledn’s clients now have access to products that include bitcoin loans, bitcoin yield accounts, stablecoin growth accounts, and ether (ETH) backed loans — a basic wealth management toolkit, according to Di Bartolomeo. The loans also provide a tax efficient way of obtaining liquidity. Customers include high net-worth individuals that were early to Bitcoin, businesses and funds. Ledn has issued $9 billion in loans since inception.

Though it’s based in Canada, Ledn was one of the first lending companies to offer services in Spanish, which allowed the firm to establish a market in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Spain while other lenders — BlockFi, Voyager, Celsius, Genesis — were pushing to capture the U.S. market. When these lenders were wiped out in 2022, Ledn was one of the only firms left standing, and it grew in the U.S. organically.

Now, with big banks wading in, Di Bartolomeo believes the pie is about to get much larger, and that Ledn is well positioned to get a sliver of it.

“Ledn will have a seat at the table no matter how this shakes out, if we continue to do our job, and that’s what I’m very excited about. How big the seat is — you know, the table is going to be huge, and there’s going to be tons of food. As long as we’re in the room, we’ll be happy.”

President Trump’s administration wants a weaker dollar and that’s bullish for bitcoin (BTC), asset manager Bitwise said in a report Tuesday.

“When it comes to the tariff push, the thing i’m most certain of is this: the Trump administration wants a significantly weaker dollar,” wrote Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise.

After a week of market turmoil cryptocurrencies surged on Wednesday following President Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause on tariffs for countries that haven’t retaliated against the U.S..

A weaker dollar has significant implications for bitcoin.

Bitwise notes that over the last five years the cryptocurrency has had a negative correlation to the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY). When the dollar falls, bitcoin rises, and Bitwise said it expects this relationship to continue in the short term.

The longer-term implications of a weaker dollar are even more positive, the report said. “A shake-up in the global macro system creates an opportunity for new reserve assets to emerge,” Hougan wrote.

A move away from the U.S. dollar as the single reserve currency to a more fractured system could give hard money, such as bitcoin and gold, a larger role to play on the global macro stage, the report added.

Bitwise said it was sticking to its year-end bitcoin price target of $200,000.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading around $82,300 at publication time.

Read more: Bitcoin’s Resilience During Tariff Chaos Impresses Wall Street Firm Bernstein

Cryptocurrencies jumped on Wednesday on news that Donald Trump stepped back some tariff burdens on countries — except for China.

According to Trump’s post on Truth Social, he issued a 90-day delay on tariffs and a substantially lowered 10% rate of reciprocal tariff for this period against all countries except China. Meanwhile, he said he raised tariffs for China to 125%, “effective immediately.”

Bitcoin (BTC), treading water around $77,000 during most of the U.S. session, surged above $81,000 on the news, up 5.5% over the past 24 hours.

Altcoin majors rallied even more, with XRP, Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX, Chainlink’s LINK, Hedera’s HBAR and SUI posting over 10% gains in the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index. Ethereum’s ETH rallied to $1,600, up 8% during the same period.

U.S. stocks also reacted positively, with the Nasdaq and the tech-heavy S&P 500 indexes up 7% and 8.8% through the day’s session.

Earlier Wednesday, Trump had posted that it was “a great time to buy.”

Justin Sun’s allegations that Hong Kong-based custodian First Digital Trust is insolvent have landed him in the cross-hairs of a defamation claim initiated by the company.

First Digital’s FDUSD stablecoin briefly de-pegged on April 3 after Sun claimed the company was “insolvent,” though it has since virtually recovered, according to CoinDesk markets data.

The writ of summons, the first step in a defamation claim, was filed late last week and requests the Hong Kong High Court to issue an injunction restraining Sun from making further statements on the matter. It also asks for an injunction requiring Sun to publish retractions.

It also asks for the Court to issue an award for damages (though it doesn’t specify how much) for “unlawful interference with the Plaintiff’s contractual and business relationships” and “causing damage to the Plaintiff’s business.”

In the time since Sun made his first claim on X that First Digital was insolvent, the Tron founder has since doubled down on the issue, holding a press conference late last week in Hong Kong alleging fraud and calling on the territory’s regulators to reform rules around trusts.

For its part, First Digital has posted examples of redemptions going through.

A date for an initial court hearing has not been set. Sun has not yet filed a response, but posted on X that he “welcomes any legal process.”

A spokesperson for Sun had no comment on the matter.

The case number is HCA 680 in Hong Kong’s High Court.