Decentral Block Post

The team behind the Official Melania Meme (MELANIA) token sold more than $1.5 million of tokens over the past three days, suggesting a programmatic selling strategy that may add downside pressure to the token.

The team behind the Melania memecoin sold another $930,000 worth of tokens on April 28, two days after selling $630,000, according to blockchain data.

The selling patterns point to dollar-cost averaging (DCA), an investment strategy used to buy or sell a predetermined amount of an asset at fixed times, according to crypto intelligence platform Lookonchain. It flagged the activity in an April 28 post on X, writing:

“The #Melania team didn’t just add or remove liquidity to sell $MELANIA, they also employed a DCA strategy for direct sales!”Source: Lookonchain

Related: Libra, Melania creator’s ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ memecoin crashes 99%

The DCA strategy involves investing a certain amount of funds in an asset at regular intervals, often employed by investors to manage emotional decision-making.

Bitcoin (BTC) is bracing for a major US macro data week as crypto market participants warn of serious volatility next.

Bitcoin retests $92,000 after a promising weekly close, but traders still see a deeper BTC price correction to come.

A bumper week of US macro data comes with the Federal Reserve under pressure on multiple fronts.

The Fed has its hands tied, analysis argues, predicting interest rates coming down, liquidity booming and BTC/USD reaching $180,000 within eighteen months.

Bitcoin short-term holders are back in the black, making current price levels especially pertinent for speculative investors.

Coinbase has urged the US Office of Government Ethics to remove a rule banning Securities and Exchange Commission staff from holding crypto.

SEC staff need to use crypto to better understand how it works and the best way to regulate it, Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal argued in open letters sent to OGE acting director Jamieson Greer and newly sworn-in SEC Chair Paul Atkins, which he shared to X on April 25.

“To regulate technology, you need to understand it. To understand technology, you need to use it,” Grewal said in the letter to Greer.

“Permitting commission staff to hold crypto is essential to them developing the knowledge necessary to propose and adopt workable regulatory frameworks for digital securities activity,” he added.

Source: Paul Grewal

Legal Advisory 22-04, issued on July 4, 2022, by the OGE, prohibits SEC staff from buying, selling, or otherwise using crypto and stablecoins because they are not “publicly traded securities” and don’t qualify for an exception, unlike stocks.

The Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial has signed a Letter of Intent with the Pakistan Crypto Council to accelerate crypto adoption in the South Asian country and one of the industry’s fastest-growing markets.

Under the partnership, World Liberty will help the Council launch regulatory sandboxes to test blockchain-based products, expand stablecoin applications for remittances and trade, explore real-world asset tokenization, and assist with the growth of decentralized finance protocols, local news outlet Business Recorder reported on April 27.

World Liberty founders Zach Witkoff, Zak Folkman and Chase Herro signed the letter in a recent meeting with the Council’s CEO Bilal bin Saqib, with Pakistan’s central bank governor, finance minister and IT secretary among those in attendance.

Source: Pakistan Crypto Council

Trump and his family backed World Liberty at the crypto lending and borrowing platform’s launch last year and they receive a cut of its profits.

The Pakistan Crypto Council is a government-backed body that oversees crypto regulation and related initiatives aimed at driving adoption and attracting more foreign investment.

Chinese tech giant Huawei has reportedly developed a powerful artificial intelligence chip that could rival high-end processors from US chip maker Nvidia.

The Shenzhen-based Huawei is poised to start testing a new AI chip called the Ascend 910D, and has approached local tech firms, which are slated to receive the first batch of sample chips by late May, The Wall Street Journal reported on April 27, citing people familiar with the matter.

The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip’s performance and get it ready for customers.

Huawei is pinning hopes on its latest Ascend AI processor being more powerful than Nvidia’s H100 chip, which was used for AI training in 2022.

Huawei is also poised to ship more than 800,000 earlier model Ascend 910B and 910C chips to customers, including state-owned telecoms operators and private AI developers such as TikTok parent ByteDance.

Crypto exchange Bitget says it is sending letters from its lawyers to account holders it alleges were involved in manipulating the price of perpetual futures contracts tied to the VOXEL token.

Eight account holders that the exchange accuses of being involved in the April 20 incident and who allegedly pocketed $20 million between them will receive a letter from the exchange's lawyers in “quick succession,” Xie Jiayin, Bitget’s head of Chinese operations, said in an April 27 X post.

“These eight accounts are the main instigators of the VOXEL incident and have improperly gained more than 20 million US dollars from it,” she said, according to a translation of the post.

“Except for these eight accounts, all other users who participated in VOXEL trading on April 20 and have withdrawn funds do not need to worry,” she added. “The accounts have been restored to normal and no responsibility will be pursued in the future.”

Source: Xie Jiayin

On April 20, Bitget said it discovered “abnormal trading activity” on its VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures contract and paused accounts it suspected of market manipulation.

Bitcoin is starting to act as a store of value during times of “US-risk-off” sentiment, marking a potential shift in its relationship with traditional assets, according to the New York Digital Investment Group.

Bitcoin (BTC) felt “noticeably different” over the trading week ended April 25, NYDIG’s global head of research Greg Cipolaro said in an April 25 market note. 

“We’ve been observing subtle shifts in its behavior over the past few weeks,” he added. “The decoupling from traditional risk assets is still very early and fragile, but for those watching crypto markets 24/7, the shift is palpable.”

“Bitcoin has acted less like a liquid levered version of levered US equity beta and more like the non-sovereign issued store of value that it is.”

Cipolaro noted that Bitcoin has gained more than 13% since the beginning of April, while US markets such as the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq have declined amid escalating global trade tensions due to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

He added that the US dollar and long-term US Treasurys have also underperformed since the election and Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, which lumped every country with various rates, the minimum being 10%.

Nike has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that accuses the sportswear giant of operating a rug pull for shuttering its non-fungible token (NFT) platform RTFKT in January. 

A group of RTFKT users led by Jagdeep Cheema claimed in the proposed class suit filed in a Brooklyn federal court on April 25 that they suffered “significant damages” as a result of Nike touting its sneaker-themed NFTs to gain investors, then shuttering the platform.

The suit claimed the NFTs were unregistered securities, as Nike sold them without registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It accused the company of using “its iconic brand and marketing prowess to hype, promote, and prop up the unregistered securities that RTFKT sold.”

“Because the Nike NFTs derived their value from the success of a given promoter and project — here, Nike and its marketing efforts — investors purchased this digital asset with the hope that its value would increase in the future as the project grows in popularity based on the Nike brand,” the lawsuit argued.

The class suit claimed investors suffered damages due to Nike shutting its NFT platform. Source: CourtListener

The lawsuit asks for $5 million in damages, claiming Nike broke consumer protection laws and violated various state unfair trade and competition laws.

The Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit could theoretically grow 100-fold and reach 2,000 transactions per second under a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) put forward by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist.

Feist, who had the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution named after him, put forward EIP-9698 on April 27, which would introduce a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1.

The proposal would gradually increase the gas limit by a factor of 10 for roughly two years, or 164,250 epochs, when one final tenfold increase would occur.

Ethereum clients would need to vote on the proposal for it to take effect, Feist said.

“By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency,” he added.

Key takeaways:

Heavy liquidations played a role in Bitcoin’s return to $95,000.

Bitcoin’s weakening correlation with stocks highlights its growing independence as an asset.

Bullish institutional investor positioning contrasts with retail traders’ caution, supporting a rally above $100,000.

Bitcoin (BTC) gained 11% between April 20 and April 26, demonstrating resilience by holding near its two-month high around $94,000. This relief rally followed signals from the Trump administration about easing import tariffs, as well as strong corporate earnings reports.

Key takeaways:

Norges Bank lost $40 billion in Q1 2025 as US tech stocks fell, exposing the risk of concentrated positions.

The bank’s indirect Bitcoin exposure via stocks reached $356 million, raising sell pressure risk amid a global trade war and recession concerns.

Abu Dhabi’s $437 million spot Bitcoin ETF stake shows sovereign wealth funds see Bitcoin as a hedge.

Norges Bank, Norway’s $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, reported a $40 billion loss in the first quarter of 2025, with most of the decline caused by a drop in the value of US-listed technology companies. Norges Bank also indirectly owned 3,821 BTC through its stock market investments by the end of 2024, presenting a potential sell pressure risk to Bitcoin, especially when considering the socio-political uncertainty and the risk of an economic recession caused by the global trade war.

Key points:

Bitcoin booked a 10% gain in the past week and technical indicators remain bullish going into a new week.

Analysts expect Bitcoin to gain an additional 40% by the end of the year

Select altcoins are showing a positive bias on improving crypto sentiment.

Bitcoin (BTC) rose more than 10% this week as buyers made a strong comeback, pushing the price to the overhead resistance at $95,000. Although buyers are struggling to clear the overhead hurdle, a positive sign is that they have not given up much ground to the bears.

Michael Saylor's Strategy is "synthetically halving Bitcoin" (BTC) by purchasing half or more of the newly minted supply from miners every single month, according to Adam Livingston, a BTC analyst and author of "The Bitcoin Age and The Great Harvest."

Livingston said miners currently produce around 450 BTC per day or approximately 13,500 BTC per month, but Strategy acquired 379,800 BTC in the last six months. This translates to the firm purchasing roughly 2,087 BTC per day — far in excess of daily miner output. The author added:

"When Bitcoin becomes this scarce, access to Bitcoin will require paying a premium. Lending against Bitcoin will cost more. Borrowing Bitcoin will become a luxury business reserved for nation-states and corporate whales, and Strategy will control the bottleneck."

"BTC's global cost of capital will no longer be set by 'the market.' It will be set by the gravitational policies of the first Bitcoin superpower: Strategy," Livingston continued.

The author's prediction of a Bitcoin supply crunch translates into much higher BTC prices if Strategy can continue its pace of BTC acquisitions while market demand for the supply-capped digital asset grows among institutional and retail investors.

The Bitcoin miner reserve, a metric tracking the total amount of BTC held in miner wallets, continues to decline. Source: CryptoQuant

Related: Michael Saylor hints at Bitcoin purchase as whales stack aggressively

Two Ethereum community members, Kevin Owocki and Devansh Mehta, proposed a dynamic fee structure for the Ethereum application layer to strike a balance between revenue generation for app builders and fairness in fee extraction.

The April 27 proposal outlined a simple equation that uses a square root function that proportionally lowers the percentage of fees as the funding capital allocated to a particular project grows. Owocki and Mehta explained:

"For smaller funding amounts, the fee follows a square root function (sqrt(1000 x N)), providing proportionally higher returns to make building mechanisms for smaller pools worthwhile. For example, if the funding pool is $170,000, then the root of 1000 x 170,000 equals $13,038.4 or 7% is taken as overhead."

The authors of the proposal added that fees would be capped at 1% once a particular application's funding pool crossed the $10 million level, ensuring that small app builders can develop decentralized applications without excess fees while also encouraging project and funding growth by capping fees as developers scale their applications.

A visualization of the proposed fee structure tapering off at higher project funding levels. Source: Ethereum Research

Owocki and Mehta's proposal to balance revenue generation and profitability among Ethereum's app builders reflects the growing calls to reform fee structures and value accrual mechanisms to maintain Ethereum's economic viability against competing networks.

Related: Ethereum's L2 approach equals many high-throughput chains — Avail exec

United States President Donald Trump recently said that federal income taxes would be "substantially reduced" or potentially eliminated once the tariff regime fully sets in.

In an April 27 Truth Social post, Trump added that the focus of the purported tax cuts would be on individuals making less than $200,000 per year.

The US President also said that the "External Revenue Service" — a reference to funding the federal government exclusively through import tariffs instead of the current model of collecting taxes through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) — is materializing.

Eliminating the federal income tax would likely be a positive catalyst for asset prices, including cryptocurrencies, as the increase in disposable income should partially flow back into productive investments. However, this stimulative effect is not guaranteed.

Source: Donald Trump

Related: If Trump fired Powell, what would happen to crypto?

Opinion by: Hedi Navazan, chief compliance officer at 1inch

Web3 needs a clear regulatory system that addresses innovation bottlenecks and user safety in decentralized finance (DeFi). A one-size-fits-all approach cannot be achieved to regulate DeFi. The industry needs custom, risk-based approaches that balance innovation, security and compliance.

DeFi’s challenges and rules

A common critique is that regulatory scrutiny leads to the death of innovation, tracing this situation back to the Biden administration. In 2022, uncertainty for crypto businesses increased following lawsuits against Coinbase, Binance and OpenSea for alleged violations of securities laws.

Under the US administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to dismiss the lawsuit against Coinbase, as the agency reversed the crypto stance, hinting at a path toward regulation with clear boundaries.

Many would argue that the same risk is the same rule. Imposing traditional finance requirements on DeFi simply will not work from many aspects but the most technical challenges.

Whales and large institutions continue their aggressive Bitcoin accumulation, with Strategy hinting at another Bitcoin investment that may be announced on Monday.

Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor hinted at another imminent Bitcoin (BTC) investment on April 27, a week after the firm acquired $555 million worth of Bitcoin at an average price of $84,785 per coin.

“Stay Humble. Stack Sats,” Saylor wrote, spurring investor speculation of the size of the firm’s next Bitcoin investment.

Source: Michael Saylor

“1.4-1.6b range imo,” wrote popular blockchain analyst RunnerXBT in anticipation of Saylor’s announcement, which would make it three times as large as Strategy’s previous investment.

Related: Bitcoin treasury firms driving $200T hyperbitcoinization — Adam Back

El Salvador, the world’s first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, is still acquiring Bitcoin despite comments from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) appearing to claim the opposite.

The treasury of El Salvador acquired 7 Bitcoin (BTC) worth over $650,000 in the seven days leading up to April 27, blockchain data from El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office shows.

When asked about the country’s Bitcoin investments, Rodrigo Valdes, director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the IMF, said that the country continues to comply with its agreement to halt government Bitcoin accumulation.

El Salvador Bitcoin holdings. Source: El Salvador Bitcoin Office

“In terms of El Salvador, let me say that I can confirm that they continue to comply with their commitment of non-accumulation of Bitcoin by the overall fiscal sector, which is the performance criteria that we have,” said Valdes during an April 26 press briefing.

Related: Crypto sentiment recovers, but weekend liquidity risks remain

Investment firms with Bitcoin-focused treasuries are front-running global Bitcoin adoption, which may see the world’s first cryptocurrency soar to a $200 trillion market capitalization in the coming decade.

Institutions and governments worldwide are starting to recognize the unique monetary properties of Bitcoin (BTC), according to Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream and the inventor of Hashcash.

“$MSTR and other treasury companies are an arbitrage of the dislocation between the bitcoin future and todays fiat world,” Back wrote in an April 26 X post.

“A sustainable and scalable $100-$200 trillion trade front-running hyperbitcoinization. scalable enough for most big listed companies to move to btc treasury,” he added.

Hyperbitcoinization refers to the theoretical future where Bitcoin soars to become the largest global currency, replacing fiat money due to its inflationary economics and growing distrust in the legacy financial system.

Comedian and actor TJ Miller says it only takes a little over two full days to get the average person up to speed on Bitcoin. However, when asked why more celebrities aren’t Bitcoiners, he says most people simply refuse to ever sit down and study again.

“It is really hard to get people to study after they graduate, from any level,” Miller told Natalie Brunell on the April 23 episode of Coin Stories. Miller claimed it takes “about 50 hours of study” to understand Bitcoin (BTC).

Hollywood rewards those who “do not think differently”

“So to say to somebody it is going to take 50 hours for you to understand this, they are like, ah, I don’t want to,” he said. “They can’t even watch a Netflix series; they can’t even watch White Lotus because it takes seven hours,” he said.

Comedian and actor TJ Miller spoke to Bitcoiner Natalie Brunell on the Coin Stories podcast. Source: Natalie Brunell

Miller said it takes “such a paradigm shift” to embrace Bitcoin, not just in money or the internet, but in life — and that’s also why you don’t see more Hollywood celebrities becoming Bitcoin maxis:

“Hollywood rewards people that do not think differently.”

During a Bitcoin lunch hosted by crypto entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano, Miller introduced himself that, to his knowledge, he is “the only celebrity that is a Bitcoiner.”

Key takeaways:

Data suggests that Bitcoin currently trades at a 40% discount.

Over 36,000 Bitcoin were withdrawn from Coinbase and Binance on April 25.

Bitcoin’s fractal pattern from Q4 2024 could propel prices above $100,000 in April.

Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading at a 40% discount to its intrinsic value, according to Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards.

Key takeaways:

Based on power curve trends, Bitcoin may hit $200,000 in Q4 2025.

Bitcoin follows gold’s price trend with a 100-150 day lag.

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price has rallied 11% this week, its best weekly return in 2025 and its highest seven-day growth since early November 2024. Bitcoin also reached $95,000 on April 25 for the first time since Feb. 24. 

Bitcoin 1-week chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

21st Capital co-founder Sina mentioned that Bitcoin reclaimed the power-law price. The power law's predictive accuracy stems from Bitcoin's network growth following Metcalfe's Law, where value scales with the square of users. 

SEC Commissioner and head of the crypto task force, Hester Peirce, says US financial firms are navigating crypto in a way that’s similar to playing the children’s game “the floor is lava,” but in the dark.

“It is time that we find a way to end this game. We need to turn on the lights and build some walkways over the lava pit,” Peirce said at the SEC “Know Your Custodian” roundtable event on April 25.

The lava is crypto, says Peirce

Peirce explained that SEC registrants are forced to approach crypto-related activities like “the floor is lava,” where the aim is to jump from one piece of furniture to the next without touching the ground, except here, touching crypto directly is the lava. “A D.C. version of this game is our regulatory approach to crypto assets, and crypto asset custody in particular,” she said.

Peirce said that, much like in the game, firms wanting to engage with crypto must avoid directly holding it due to unclear regulatory rules. “To engage in crypto-related activities, SEC-registrants have had to hop from one poorly illuminated regulatory space to the next, all while ensuring that they never touch any crypto asset,” Peirce said.

Source: US Securities and Exchange Commission

Peirce said that investment advisers are often unsure which crypto assets qualify as securities, what entities count as qualified custodians, and whether “exercising staking or voting rights” could trigger custody violations.

Update (April 26 at 8:57 PM UTC): This article has been updated to include updates from Loopscale.

Solana decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Loopscale temporarily halted its lending markets after suffering an approximately $5.8 million exploit. 

On April 26, a hacker siphoned approximately 5.7 million USDC (USDC) and 1200 Solana (SOL) from the lending protocol after taking out a “series of undercollateralized loans”, Loopscale co-founder Mary Gooneratne said in an X post. 

Loopscale has since “re-enabled loan repayments, top-ups, and loop closing”, but “[a]ll other app functions (including Vault withdrawals) are still temporarily restricted while we investigate and ensure mitigation of this exploit,” Loopscale said in an April 26 X post.

The exploit only impacted Loopscale’s USDC and SOL vaults and the losses represent around 12% of Loopscale’s total value locked (TVL), Gooneratne added. 

United States Senator Jon Ossoff expressed support for impeaching President Donald Trump during an April 25 town hall, citing the President’s plan to host a private dinner for top Official Trump memecoin holders. 

“I mean, I saw just 48 hours ago, he is granting audiences to people who buy his meme coin,” said Ossoff, a Democrat, according to a report by NBC News. 

“When the sitting president of the United States is selling access for what are effectively payments directly to him. There is no question that that rises to the level of an impeachable offense.”

Senator Ossoff said he “strongly” supports impeachment proceedings during a town hall in the state of Georgia, where he is running for reelection to the Senate.

The Senator added that an impeachment is unlikely unless the Democratic Party gains control of Congress during the US midterm elections in 2026. Trump’s own Republican Party currently has a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. 

Opinion by: Raullen Chai, co-founder and CEO of IoTeX

The United States and other superpowers are on the brink of a financial evolution. With President Donald Trump’s recent executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) and a US Digital Asset Stockpile (DAS), the conversation around digital assets in government reserves is gaining momentum.

Countries like Czechia have also followed suit with their sovereign digital asset reserve plans. While Bitcoin (BTC) and select altcoins are being considered, the discussion remains incomplete without including decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) tokens.

DePIN represents a new paradigm in infrastructure development, where communities, not corporations, build and operate essential networks like telecommunications that self-govern and distribute rewards to their individual contributors. 

If it were to include DePIN tokens in its DAS, the US could use blockchain technology to create a self-sustaining infrastructure economy that strengthens technological leadership.

Crypto investor sentiment has seen a significant recovery from global tariff concerns, but analysts warn that the market’s structural weaknesses may still result in downside momentum during periods of weekend illiquidity.

Risk appetite appeared to return among crypto investors this week after US President Donald Trump adopted a softer tone, saying that import tariffs on Chinese goods may “come down substantially.”

However, the improved investor sentiment “does not guarantee that Bitcoin will avoid volatility over the weekend,” analysts from Bitfinex exchange told Cointelegraph:

“Sentiment improvements reduce fragility, but they do not eliminate structural risks like thin weekend liquidity.” 

“Historically, weekends remain vulnerable to sharp moves — especially when open interest is high and market depth is low,” the analysts said, adding that unexpected macroeconomic news can still increase volatility during low liquidity periods.

Related: Trump fought the bond market, the bond market won: Saifedean Ammous

DeFi Development Corp (formerly Janover) aims to raise over $1 billion worth of capital to invest in Solana, the industry’s sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The Nasdaq-listed firm, previously a real estate financing platform connecting commercial property lenders and buyers, announced its plans in a Form S-3 registration statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 25.

The filing states that the funds will be used for general corporate purposes, including Solana (SOL) token acquisitions.

DeFi Development Corp S-3 filing. Source: SEC

According to the filing, the company may use proceeds from the offering to purchase more Solana, noting:

“Solana does not pay interest, but staking rewards can be earned on Solana. The ability to generate a return on investment from the net proceeds from this offering will depend on whether there is appreciation in the value of Solana following our purchases of Solana with the net proceeds from this offering.”

The company also warned that fluctuations in Solana’s price could lead to it converting the tokens into cash at a value “substantially below” the net proceeds raised.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the crypto firm associated with the family of US President Donald Trump, made waves when it debuted late last year.

WLFI caused a stir when it launched ahead of the president’s inauguration. Observers have accused the project of front-running important crypto-related events, like the White House Crypto summit, and presenting a conflict of interest.

Trump is in a unique position to influence outcomes that would affect his portfolio, but WLFI is not insulated from the broader market trends, which have seen crypto and stock prices drop amid significant macroeconomic concerns.

The Trump administration will soon mark 100 days in office. Here’s what WLFI has been up to, and how the president’s crypto investments are shaking out.

The “gold paper” for WLFI features flattering Trump imagery. Source: WLFI