Coindesk

“Hi Curly, kill anyone today,” said Billy Crystal’s Mitch to Jack Palance’s Curly in City Slickers. “Day ain’t over yet,” replied Curly.

Bernstein, though, is ready to call it a day, saying bitcoin’s (BTC) being down just 26% from its record high of less than three months ago shows resilience.

Previous crises, such as the Covid-19 epidemic and interest rate shocks, saw the world’s largest cryptocurrency “fall of the cliff” with 50-70% drawdowns, the report noted.

The price action “suggests demand from more resilient capital,” the analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote.

“Bitcoin’s digital gold thesis has strengthened driven by growing institutional adoption – institutional flows via ETFs and corporate treasuries,” the authors wrote.

Still, tariffs are bad news for the miners.

They impact the mining supply chain, and this has negative implications for the U.S. bitcoin miners’ hashrate, Bernstein said. The hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.

Large bitcoin miners, such as Riot Platforms (RIOT), IREN (IREN), MARA Holdings (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK), could gain market share as they are already scaled and have artificial intelligence (AI) optionality, the report added.

Read more: Why Trump’s Tariffs Could Actually Be Good for Bitcoin

The DAO running Aavegotchi, a niche non-fungible token (NFT) game, voted overwhelmingly to migrate the entire ecosystem to Base from Polygon, a move reflecting shifting developer and user sentiment in the broader Ethereum layer-2 landscape.

With 93.25% of the vote in favor, the proposal — titled “Make Aavegotchi Based Again” — lays out plans for a full deployment on Base, the Coinbase layer-2 blockchain that has gained traction among decentralized applications.

All Aavegotchi NFTs, wearables, game assets and smart contracts will be cloned and relaunched on Base, according to the proposal, with legacy assets on Polygon set to remain viewable but frozen to prevent transfers or updates.

The migration comes amid a steep decline in Polygon usage. According to data from DeFiLlama, total value locked (TVL) on the chain has dropped from a near $10 billion peak in 2021 to just $737 million today. In early 2024, TVL stood at $892 million.

Base, meanwhile, has seen TVL surge to $2.9 billion from $430 million since the beginning of last year. Artemis data further shows Polygon’s daily active addresses fell from 1.3 million to 550,000 over the past year, while Base more than doubled to nearly 900,000.

Pixelcraft Studios, the developer behind Aavegotchi, cited improved onboarding, faster transactions and better marketplace support as key reasons for the move. A wrapper contract will also be introduced to protect assets listed on marketplaces like MagicEden and OpenSea.

The migration is expected to be completed within four to six weeks.

One of the oldest Bitcoin ecosystem projects is moving to the next stage of enabling developers to build layer-2 networks using its computational layer.

Rootstock is one of many projects currently advancing the goal of bringing greater utility and interoperability to Bitcoin, which it is doing using “BitVMX”, a modified version of the BitVM programming language.

Rootstock’s project is weeks away from releasing software development kits (SDKs), allowing developers to start producing their own Bitcoin layer-2s using BitVMX, founder Sergio Lerner told CoinDesk.

SDKs are sets of tools enabling third-parties to build applications using a particular platform or framework.

“We are very close to having all the pieces ready for people to start building their own solutions on top of BitVMX,” Lerner said in an interview.

Rootstock’s BitVMX project harnesses the BitVM paradigm introduced by Robin Linus in 2023 as a design for how Ethereum-style smart contracts could be built on Bitcoin. This could then greatly improve Bitcoin’s scalability through enabling the building of faster, layer-2 networks with programmability similar to what’s possible on Ethereum and other blockchains.

BitVMX Platform

Alongside BitVMX contributors Fairgate, RootstockLabs last year made a breakthrough in using BitVMX to verify a zero-knowledge SNARK (Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge), an integral aspect of cryptography in many blockchain systems.

The availability of tools for other developers to explore these capabilities further will drive competition and thus increase adoption, according to Lerner.

“There is a difference between a product and a platform: a product is closed but a platform is something you can easily plug in to and develop your own ideas on top of,” he said.

“BitVMX is becoming a platform, which means there will be a lot more competition: rollups and sidechains competing against each other and the ones that can find use cases for people to power their tools will win.”

Lerner, a a Buenos Aires-based programmer, is best known for his research on Bitcoin in its early years and his later contribution to the development on Ethereum.

He told CoinDesk he fears that Bitcoin will not fulfill the purpose for which he says it was created – becoming a “money for the people” – if it remains just a store of value.

“If all BTC just end up in ETFs, they will all be controlled by financial institutions and there will be no more Bitcoin as we know it,,” he said.

“So we all need to be making bitcoin payments and holding our own BTC in self custody. That’s why we thought creating layers for Bitcoin is the right approach and I think the key for this is BitVM protocols, especially BitVMX.”

BitVMX Force

RootstockLabs and Fairgate have formed an alliance to expand Bitcoin’s utility using BitVMX, which also involves blockchain infrastructure engineering firm Input | Output (IO).

“BitVMX Force” will focus on standardization and protocol enhancements to help smooth out future Bitcoin soft-forks and infrastructure improvements as they occur, according to an emailed announcement shared with CoinDesk Tuesday.

“Rootstock and IO both have their own initiatives: Rootstock is building Union, which is a bridge between Bitcoin and Rootstock based on BitVMX and IO is working on a project to move assets from Bitcoin to Cardano and back again,” Fairgate CEO Jonatan Altszul said in an interview.

“Fairgate is pushing this technology as well and we thought that together we will have more firepower, more strength, more capacity to create a larger community.”

“Decoupling” is back, but not in the way bitcoin (BTC) bulls would like.

After “Black Monday” never materialized in the U.S., stocks on Tuesday are flying higher, but bitcoin is headed in the opposite direction.

Roughly two hours into the U.S. trading day, the Nasdaq is ahead 3% and the S&P 500 nearly that much. Bitcoin, however — after earlier pushing back above $80,000 — has retreated to just north of $78,000 and within sight of its panicky weekend low in the $75,000 area.

The stock bounce comes after days of historic losses set off by President Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements last Wednesday evening. A couple of decent headlines are helping things along. Among them were a Trump social media posting of an imminent trade deal with South Korea and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent projecting optimism about the U.S. position with respect to China.

The stock rally is global in nature, with Europe higher by 3% near the close of its trading day and Japan’s Nikkei posting a 6% advance.

What gives?

The easiest answer to a reason for the divergence would be to zoom out. In very rough terms, bitcoin is lower by about 9% from the time of the president’s Wednesday afternoon tariff announcement. That’s not far off from the Nasdaq’s roughly 8% decline over the same time frame.

Zooming out even further finds bitcoin — while having retreated nearly 30% from its record hit in mid-January — remains ahead by about 14% since last November’s election while the Nasdaq has declined by nearly 10%.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) axed its crypto unit on Monday, telling staff that the DOJ would be “narrowing” its crypto enforcement activities in accordance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s January executive order on digital assets, which pledged to establish “regulatory clarity and certainty” for the crypto industry.

In his four-page memo to staff titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) — created in 2022 under then-President Joe Biden — would be “disbanded effective immediately.”

“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote in the memo seen by CoinDesk. “However, the prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution, which was ill conceived and poorly executed. The Justice Department 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.”

Blanche informed staff that the DOJ would no longer be pursuing cases against crypto exchanges, mixing services or offline wallets “for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations.” Staff were ordered not to charge regulatory violations in cases involving crypto, including violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), unlicensed money transmitting and other violations tied to federal securities and commodities laws.

Instead, DOJ staff were ordered to focus their resources on “prosecuting individuals who victimize digital asset investors” or who use crypto in the furtherance of criminal activities like terrorism or gang financing.

“Ongoing investigations that are inconsistent with the foregoing should be closed,” Blanche wrote, adding that his office will work with the DOJ’s criminal division to “review ongoing cases for consistency with this policy.”

NCET is not the first federal crypto task force to be disbanded since Trump took office in January. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) slashed a number of specialized enforcement teams, including a crypto-focused team, down to just two as part of Acting Chair Caroline Pham’s plan to increase efficiency and “stop regulation by enforcement.”

NCET worked on many of the DOJ’s high profile crypto cases in recent years, including crypto mixer Tornado Cash and several of its developers and Mango Markets exploiter Avi Eisenberg, who faces sentencing later this week after being convicted of fraud and market manipulation.

The memo comes a week and a half after Trump pardoned crypto trading platform BitMEX and its founders and senior executives following their past guilty pleas to Bank Secrecy Act charges.

Frank Spiteri, head of asset management at CoinShares (CS), left the crypto investment manager recently, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

His departure was not part of a wider cull at the Saint Helier, Jersey-based company, which is currently recruiting for a number of positions, said one of the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is private.

Spiteri did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. CoinShares declined to comment.

Spiteri has over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry and worked for CoinShares for over five years in London. Prior to CoinShares, he was employed as head of European distribution and capital markets at ETF issuer WisdomTree, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In February, Stockholm-listed CoinShares reported one of its strongest quarters to date. Fourth-quarter revenue rose to £48.3 million versus £31.6 million a year earlier.

Coinbase (COIN) is more than just a crypto trading platform, Wall Street broker Cantor said in a research report Tuesday, initiating coverage of the stock.

Cantor assumed coverage of the crypto exchange with an overweight rating and a $245 price target. In early trading, the shares were up more than 5%.

“Markets are missing what it is doing beyond trading, particularly with its L2 (Base) and its stablecoin relationship with Circle,” analysts Brett Knoblauch and Thomas Shinske wrote. Coinbase shares are attractive at current levels, as they are trading at around a 32% discount to historical valuation multiples, the report added.

The broker sees both these segments as “instrumental in changing the narrative surrounding COIN, from being a cyclical crypto trading platform to being a mission-critical infrastructure of the crypto economy.”

The report said the shares are expected to re-rate higher once investors have increased visibility into the earnings potential of Base and stablecoins.

Base gives Coinbase an edge, the report said. The layer 2’s strong user growth creates a “flywheel effect” that benefits the crypto exchange with more transaction fees.

Cantor said the stablecoin opportunity is also being underappreciated by the market, especially given the potential for these cryptocurrencies to displace traditional finance cross-border payment rails.

Read more: Cathie Wood’s ARK Buys Over $13M Worth Coinbase Shares During Market Rout

Frank Holmes has had a long career as a money manager: financing gold mining companies; getting involved in the creation of gold royalty companies; developing financial products for the airline industry — all of this with U.S. Global Investors (GROW), the publicly-traded asset management firm he’s been leading since 1989.

He’s also the chairman of HIVE Blockchain Technologies (HIVE), a bitcoin mining company with a $345 million market capitalization and a rapidly expanding footprint in Paraguay, thanks to a recent deal in which the firm acquired facilities previously owned by another miner, Bitfarms. The firm was born, he said, after he attempted to launch a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2017.

HIVE has been green from the get-go. Its first facility used geothermal energy in Iceland; another used hydro-power in Sweden, only 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Now, the company expects to have roughly 430 megawatts (MW) of infrastructure up and running by the third quarter of 2025 — meaning enough energy to power a city of 86,000 homes.

Holmes will be speaking at the BTC & Mining Summit at Consensus 2025, in Toronto on May 14-15.

In the lead-up to the event, Holmes shared his thoughts about HIVE’s situation within the broader mining industry, the company’s decision to recycle its GPUs for AI purposes, and what the future holds.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

CoinDesk: HIVE has been repurposing some of its GPUs for AI. Can you tell me about that?

Frank Holmes: At one time we had 130,000 AMD chips and we were mining ether (ETH). We were about 6% of the world’s ether mining and it was very profitable. When that went away [with Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake in 2022], we had this expertise in GPU chips and we replaced a lot of our AMD chips with Nvidia chips. That allowed us to start going down the AI path.

The difference between a basic ASIC miner and Nvidia chips is like driving a Bronco and a Ferrari. The delicacy of the motor, the engines, all the gearing that goes into a high performance car — all of that relates much more to a GPU. When Antminers S21 Pros show up, it takes us six hours to unwrap them and plug them in. When the Nvidia chips show up, like an H100, it’s six weeks before you’ve built the brain and it’s working. So it’s a completely different skill set.

When you’re building infrastructure for bitcoin mining, you’re spending a million dollars per megawatt of electricity. When you go into high performance computing (HPC), the facilities need so much redundancy that you spend $10 million per megawatt. That’s excluding the equipment. You’ve got much higher logistical engineering requirements, and you’ve got much higher capital expenses.

When you want to source energy for bitcoin mining, you can take variable energy, and the real key part is the cost of the energy. In Sweden, we can go from 30 megawatts to three megawatts in 15 seconds. So we’re able to give back energy, or take it on.

When you’re HPC, you have to be up all the time, and so you need to have this backup of generators, batteries. Stability of energy is much more critical for HPC than it is for bitcoin mining. So you have a matrix that you’re trying to play with.

Does the Trump administration’s tariff strategy impact your operations?

We listen to the U.S. because it’s so important for branding and liquidity. But we never did anything in the U.S. because we’re always concerned about the overreach of regulatory agencies in Washington. They basically weaponized the auditors to go after anyone that was in crypto. So we said, ‘Let’s just stay neutral in this jurisdiction.’ Then Trump won, so we decided to move our head office over. That’s strategic, because if your head office is in the U.S., you qualify for many of the various indexes. We don’t have mining operations in the U.S. yet.

But you’ve expanded significantly in Paraguay.

I think what happened in Paraguay to Bitfarms is that they went through some distraction with their CEO [left]. There was a vacuum. Then Riot (RIOT) tried to come in to buy and control them. During that turmoil period, the Paraguayan government put a tariff on bitcoin miners, which was really very weird, but it happened, and it will drop away, I think, next year. It was all unsettling for the new CEO, and he wanted to pivot to the U.S. So they merged with Stronghold (SDIG) to basically become an American company, like a reverse takeover.

They still have 80 megawatts of electricity in Paraguay, but most of the operations we’re now taking over. We’re finishing the construction, and we’re very excited about it. We already have a few machines working. We have the biggest growth profile in 2025 of all the bitcoin miners. We have not done any of these funky convertible debentures to buy bitcoin. Most of them paid much higher prices. No, we’ve not done that because we know how volatile it can be. Every time everyone starts doing this binge debt buying — well, before, in 2021 it was all for buying mining equipment. This time, it’s all for buying bitcoin. Bitcoin then goes to a correction, and they all get strangled. We just don’t want to be in that position.

We really see the opportunity in Paraguay. It has the largest dam in the Western hemisphere, shared 50/50 with Brazil. It’s 14 gigawatts and like eight kilometers long. It’s so immense. If Paraguay doesn’t use the electricity, then Brazil gets to keep it. Well, Bitcoin miners don’t do that. We help build out their infrastructure, and they get paid U.S. dollars every month. So it’s a win-win for the Paraguayan government and it’s a win-win for HIVE shareholders, because we want to stay focused on green energy.

Are there other jurisdictions you’re looking to expand to?

We’re looking at proposals coming from East Africa. Ethiopia in particular has a lot of stranded electricity. Some of the other miners have already gone into that area. They got all this cheap money from the World Bank and other institutions, and they built the dams, but then they didn’t build the power lines throughout the economy. It’s a big expense. We have a very clear vision to go from 6 EH/s to about 25 EH/s in the next nine months.

How do you see the mining industry’s situation right now?

I don’t think it’s healthy. You have to be cognizant that there’s a change for a lot of the big miners. Major U.S. corporations are not really into mining expansion. They’re predominantly focused on adding bitcoin to their balance sheet. They’re all emulating Michael Saylor’s business model. But for Bitcoin’s ecosystem to function, you need to have growth in the nodes. You need to have growth in mining operations so we become even more decentralized. Some of the companies should be probably investing more in the Lightning Network or in Ordinals infrastructure to differentiate themselves.

What Bitdeer (BTDR) is doing [with ASIC manufacturing] is really smart. The founder was also a co-founder of Bitmain. So coming in with a new piece of technology which is very energy efficient in terms of joules consumed, I think that’s very good and competitive for the capital markets.

Bitcoin miners are going to go through a process that happened to the gold miners. When the GLD came out for bullion, all of a sudden there was a separation — gold stocks versus the GLD. This century, gold bullion has outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. But only the quality gold stocks, the royalty gold stocks, have actually outperformed. One of the things that HIVE has always had is the old royalty model of high revenue per employee, so that we can deal with these down drafts and not have to go through this panic of big layoffs.

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 2309.92, up 2.5% (+55.35) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

Nineteen of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: HBAR (+8.6%) and APT (+5.6%).

Laggards: FIL (+0.0%) and AAVE (+1.4%).

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

Plume, a blockchain platform focused on real-world assets (RWAs), said on Tuesday it secured an investment from funds managed by private equity giant Apollo Global Management as it looks to scale up its infrastructure and bring more traditional financial products on-chain.

The protocol did not disclose the terms of the funding. A spokesperson for Plume told CoinDesk that it was a “seven-figure” investment.

Plume develops a modular, Ethereum-compatible blockchain designed to turn a wide range of assets — from financial instruments to carbon credits and collectibles — into usable tokens. Its goal is to create an environment where users can not only hold the digital versions of real-world assets but also use them in familiar crypto activities like lending, borrowing, swapping and speculating.

The investment will help Plume fast-track its full-stack blockchain buildout and widen access to its ecosystem. Plume said its testnet already supports more than 18 million user crypto wallets and over 200 integrated protocols.

The funding from Apollo, one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers, underscores growing institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets, using blockchain rails for traditional instruments like bonds, funds and commodities. A recent report from Ripple and Boston Consulting Group projected that the market for tokenized assets could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033.

For an asset manager like Apollo, which has been eyeing digital finance for some time, the deal with Plume is a bet on infrastructure that aims to make alternative assets more liquid and programmable.

“Our investment in Plume underscores Apollo’s focus on technologies that broaden access to institutional-quality products and create more seamless, innovative client experiences,” Christine Moy, partner and head of digital assets at Apollo, said in a statement. “As private assets and funds increasingly move on-chain, Plume represents a new kind of infrastructure focused on digital asset utility, investor engagement, and next-generation financial solutions – advancing the development of a more efficient and programmable financial system.”

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.