Decentral Block Post

Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of the now-defunct cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius, faces a 20-year prison sentence as the US Department of Justice (DOJ) seeks a severe penalty for his role in a multibillion-dollar fraud.

The DOJ on April 28 filed the government’s sentencing memorandum against Mashinsky, recommending a 20-year prison sentence for his fraudulent actions, which led to billions of dollars in losses for Celsius customers.

The 97-page memo mentioned that Celsius users were unable to access approximately $4.7 billion in crypto assets after the platform halted withdrawals on June 12, 2022.

“The Court should sentence Alexander Mashinsky to twenty years’ imprisonment as just punishment for his years-long campaign of lies and self-dealing that left in its wake billions in losses and thousands of victimized customers,” the DOJ stated.

Mashinsky’s personal benefit was $48 million

In addition to the investor losses, the DOJ noted that Mashinsky has personally profited from the fraudulent schemes in his role.

Key points:

Bitcoin has beaten out three key resistance levels in a single weekly candle.

The weekly close defended the 2025 yearly open, but a subsequent dip below it is making analysis question the strength of the BTC price breakout.

BTC/USD remains in a “critical zone” pending fresh support confirmations.

Bitcoin (BTC) has broken through three key resistance levels in a week, but its biggest reclaim battle continues.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch has launched on Solana, marking a significant step toward its vision of a “unified multichain” decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

According to a press release shared with Cointelegraph, the integration enables users to trade over 1 million Solana-based tokens directly through the 1inch decentralized application (DApp), benefiting from maximal extractable value-protected swaps, optimized rates and open-source smart contract infrastructure.

The move brings 1inch’s Fusion protocol to Solana for the first time. Fusion enables users to define their ideal swap parameters, which are then executed by competing professional market makers, or “resolvers,” using Dutch auction mechanics.

Combined with Solana’s ultra-fast block times, the setup promises more efficient and seamless trading execution than other networks.

A 1inch representative told Cointelegraph that users could expect “minimal fees” when executing swaps on Solana. “Users may expect costs of less than one cent,” they said.

The concept of a Russian ruble stablecoin received special attention at a major local crypto event, the Blockchain Forum in Moscow, with key industry executives reflecting on some of the core features a ruble-backed stablecoin might require.

Sergey Mendeleev, founder of the digital settlement exchange Exved and inactive founder of the sanctioned Garantex exchange, put forward seven key criteria for a potential “replica of Tether” in a keynote at the Blockchain Forum on April 23.

Mendeleev said a potential ruble stablecoin must have untraceable transactions and allow transfers without Know Your Customer (KYC) checks.

However, because one of the criteria also requires the stablecoin to comply with Russian regulations, he expressed skepticism that such a product could emerge soon.

The DAI model praised 

Mendeleev proposed that a potential Russian “Tether replica” must be overcollateralized similarly to the Dai (DAI) stablecoin model, a decentralized algorithmic stablecoin that maintains its one-to-one peg with the US dollar using smart contracts.

A trio of major Abu Dhabi institutions, including the Emirate’s sovereign wealth fund, have teamed up to launch a new dirham-pegged stablecoin.

Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADQ, the United Arab Emirates’ largest bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), and the massive conglomerate the International Holding Company, have partnered to launch the stablecoin, pending regulatory approval, the three companies said on April 28.

The trio said the stablecoin would be regulated by the UAE’s central bank and backed by the country’s currency, the dirham. It will also support use cases such as machine-to-machine and artificial intelligence.

Source: IHC

The goal is to place the UAE at the “forefront of global blockchain innovation,” while also strengthening the digital infrastructure, according to ADQ.

If it gets the nod from regulators, the new stablecoin will operate on the ADI blockchain, created by the ADI Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping established financial systems and governments advance and adopt blockchain technology.

The founders of the crypto fintech firm Bankera used funds from the project’s 2018 initial coin offering to purchase luxury properties worldwide, according to a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The OCCRP reported on April 28, citing leaked company records and bank statements, that nearly half of the funds from Bankera’s 100 million euro ($114 million) ICO were transferred to a bank in the Pacific Island country of Vanuatu that was purchased by the project’s founders, Vytautas Karalevičius, Justas Dobiliauskas and Mantas Mockevičius.

Soon after, the Vanuatu bank reportedly began issuing millions of euros in loans to companies owned by the trio to build a luxury real estate portfolio — including a villa in the French Riviera and high-end property in Lithuania, where the project was founded.

Bankera’s three founders. Source: Bankera

The leaked records and statements reportedly show that the funds were used to underwrite loans to other companies, which were then used to purchase high-end real estate. 

The Vanuatu bank also loaned millions more directly to the three founders for “personal use,” according to the OCCRP report.

Researchers at the University of Zurich have been accused of undertaking an unauthorized four-month-long experiment on a Reddit board using artificial intelligence-generated comments to test whether AI could alter people’s opinions. 

As part of the experiment, AI-powered accounts faked a variety of personas, including a rape victim, a person opposed to specific social movements and a trauma counselor specializing in abuse, moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit said in an April 26 post.

“Our sub is a decidedly human space that rejects undisclosed AI as a core value,” the moderators said. “People do not come here to discuss their views with AI or to be experimented upon.” 

The researchers used AI to generate responses but attempted to personalize the replies based on information from the original posters’ prior Reddit history, such as political orientation, gender, age, and ethnicity, according to a draft of the paper.

Moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit say researchers at the University of Zurich conducted an unauthorized experiment within their community. Source: Reddit

Over the four-month experiment, Zurich University’s fake AI accounts posted 1,783 comments and received 137 deltas — a mark showing when another Reddit user acknowledged the account had persuaded them to change their opinion on an issue. 

US federal prosecutors and the co-founders of the crypto mixer Samourai Wallet have asked a court for more time to consider potentially dismissing the case after the Justice Department rolled back its crypto enforcement.

Lawyers for Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez and chief technology officer William Hill said in an April 28 letter to Manhattan federal judge Richard Berman that they jointly requested with the government “for a continuance of the pretrial motions schedule by 16 days.”

The Samourai executives' lawyers said on April 10 that they wrote to Acting Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton to request the dismissal of the case after an April 7 memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche shuttered the Justice Department’s crypto team.

“On April 24, 2025, defense counsel met with the prosecutors and their supervisors in person at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to discuss this request,” the lawyers said.

“The Defendants believe that a continuance of the pretrial motions schedule is warranted to permit Defendants to avoid the significant expense of preparing their motions while the Government determines its position,” the letter stated.

While United States dollar-denominated stablecoins dominate the stablecoin and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization game, other competitors are coming into play, according to Tether co-founder Reeve Collins. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph in Dubai, Collins said that while dollar-backed stablecoins may be dominant, other currencies and assets may compete to back stablecoins.

“The stablecoin definitely helps preserve the dollar dominance, especially in the crypto space,” Collins said. “The dollar is kind of the reserve currency of crypto. But now there are other currencies coming into play. But more importantly, it’s not currencies. It’s other types of backing,” he added.

Collins said that other assets used to back stablecoins may compete with US dollars by bringing a higher yield to users. 

Interview with Tether co-founder Reeve Collins in Dubai, UAE. Source: Cointelegraph 

Tether co-founder says tokenized assets can back stablecoins

Collins, who works bringing stablecoin yield for users through Pi Protocol, told Cointelegraph that apart from currencies, money-market funds, other commodities and gold could back stablecoins in the future. 

Legendary investor Ray Dalio has said the world is “on the brink” of the global monetary order breaking down, which is being accelerated by the Trump administration’s tariff disruptions.

The trade tensions are fracturing the monetary, political and international world orders by fueling deglobalization and unsustainable trade imbalances, Dalio, the former CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, said in an April 28 X post.

Dalio added that this is leading to irreversible damage, and an increasing number of importers and exporters, particularly between the US and China, are drastically reducing interdependencies and “making alternative plans.”

“[They’re] recognizing that whatever happens with tariffs, these problems won't go away, and that radically reduced interdependencies with the US is a reality that has to be planned for.”Source: Ray Dalio

Dalio said America’s role as the world’s largest consumer of manufactured goods and the largest debt issuer is looking increasingly unsustainable, and the idea that trade partners would continue selling to the US and receive dollars was “naive thinking.”

As a result, more countries may increasingly bypass the US by forming new trade networks that rely on alternative currencies.

The crypto lobby group, the DeFi Education Fund, has petitioned the Trump administration to end what it claimed was the “lawless prosecution” of open-source software developers, including Roman Storm, a creator of the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash.

In an April 28 letter to White House crypto czar David Sacks, the group urged President Donald Trump “to take immediate action to discontinue the Biden-era Department of Justice's lawless campaign to criminalize open-source software development.” 

The letter specifically mentioned the prosecution of Storm, who was charged in August 2023 with helping launder over $1 billion in crypto through Tornado Cash. His trial is still set for July, and his fellow charged co-founder, Roman Semenov, is at large and believed to be in Russia.

The DeFi Education Fund said that in Storm’s case, the Department of Justice is attempting to hold software developers criminally liable for how others use their code, which is “not only absurd in principle, but it sets a precedent that potentially chills all crypto development in the United States.”

The group also called for the recognition that the prosecution contradicts the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) guidance from Trump’s first term, which established that developers of self-custodial, peer-to-peer protocols are not money transmitters. 

Mastercard says it will allow merchants across its network to be paid with stablecoins in a partnership with payment processor Nuvei and stablecoin issuers Circle and Paxos. 

Through the venture, 150 million merchants across the Mastercard network will now have the option to receive payments in stablecoins, regardless of how a customer pays, Mastercard said on April 28.

The payments giant also partnered with crypto exchange OKX for a crypto-enabled bank card, which Mastercard product chief Jorn Lambert said creates a “360-degree approach” where consumers can spend stablecoins and merchants can receive them.

He added that the “mainstream use cases are clear” for blockchain tech, and the company wanted “to make it as easy for merchants to receive stablecoin payments and for consumers to use them.”

Source: Mastercard News

The stablecoin market has continued to make gains, crossing a market value of $230 billion, an increase of 54% since last year, with Tether (USDT) and USDC (USDC) dominating 90% of the market.

The Ethereum Foundation, which backs the development of the Ethereum blockchain, has overhauled its leadership structure to separate the responsibilities of its management team and board of directors.

The board will act as the “security council to protect the heart and soul” of the foundation and set visions for Ethereum, while the new management will be focused on the strategic and operational execution of those visions, the Foundation said in an April 28 blog post.

It added in an April 28 X post that Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed as co-executive directors on March 2 to deliver on those visions — which are centered around championing censorship resistance, open-source innovation, privacy and security

Wang and Stańczak’s roles took effect on April 28 with the foundation setting a two-year term for Stańczak to address some of Ethereum’s biggest challenges. Stańczak’s new role will be balanced with his work as founder of Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind and a soon-to-be-announced Ethereum-focused venture capital firm.

Source: Ethereum Foundation

Bastian Aue and Josh Stark are also a part of the management team, with Aue to focus on organizational strategy, hiring and training, and Stark to primarily be tasked with project execution, communications and marketing.

Key takeaways:

BONK price is up 73% since April 22, hitting a five-month high of $0.00002167.

BONK’s open interest surged 290% to $43.2 million. 

Bonk (BONK), the second-largest Solana-based memecoin by market capitalization, is on track to continue the recovery it began on April 22. BONK has climbed approximately 73% from its April 22 low of around $0.00001247, bringing its price up to an intraday high of $0.00002167 on April 28.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows BONK trading at $0.00001923, up 3% over the 24 hours and 60% over the last seven days.

Wallet provider MetaMask is launching a crypto payments card that will allow users to spend self-custodied funds, offering crypto holders additional ways to use their tokens.

The new card is backed by Mastercard and is being developed in partnership with CompoSecure and Baanx, according to the company. The product uses smart contracts to execute the IRL (In Real Life) transactions, with a processing speed under five seconds. It operates on the Linea network, a layer-2 scaling solution on Ethereum.

The companies marketed the self-custodied crypto card as an alternative to the potential risks associated with centralized exchanges. In February, the second-largest crypto exchange by volume, Bybit, was hacked for $1.4 billion, an event that sparked widespread consternation in the crypto space.

With the launch of its card, MetaMask is entering a competitive segment of the cryptocurrency market. Major exchanges like Binance, Bybit, Coinbase, and Crypto.com already offer crypto debit cards, some of which feature "crypto-back" rewards that allow users to earn digital assets on their purchases.

MetaMask has struggled lately as interest in and participation in the Ethereum ecosystem have dried up. According to Dune Analytics, the wallet collected just $289,312 in fees for the week of April 14, much less than the $1.3 million in fees collected for the same period a year ago.

Related: Spar supermarket in Switzerland starts accepting Bitcoin payments

Despite growing competition from emerging issuers, the stablecoin market remains largely dominated by a few key players. According to data from Web3 research firm Nansen, Tether’s USDt continues to lead among US dollar-pegged stablecoins, even as competition intensifies.

As of April 25, Tether (USDT) has a roughly 66% market share among stablecoins, compared to around 28% for USDC (USDC), Nansen said in the April 25 report. Ethena’s USDe stablecoin ranks a distant third, touting a market share of just over 2%.

Nansen expects Tether’s lead to endure even as rivals such as USDC clock faster growth rates.

“With nearly 3x as many users as Uniswap and 50+% more transactions than the next app, Tether is by and far the largest use case of onchain activity,” Nansen said.

“Despite the potential dispersion in stables, we inevitably believe this is a ‘winner-takes-most’ market dynamic,” the Web3 researcher added. 

Lawmakers in the Arizona House of Representatives have voted to pass two bills that could allow the state to adopt a reserve using Bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies.

In a third reading on April 28 of the Senate Bill 1025 (SB1025), a proposal to amend Arizona’s statutes to allow for a strategic BTC reserve, 31 members of the Arizona House voted in favor of the bill, with 25 opposed. A similar bill, SB1373, to establish a state-level digital assets reserve, passed with 37 lawmakers in favor and 19 voting nay.

“This bill basically takes the approach that probably 15 other states are considering the same legislation nationwide that allows the treasurer to invest up to 10% into, probably mainly Bitcoin but other things as well,” said State Representative Jeff Weninger on SB1025. “I think this probably would start as a ‘may’ for the foreseeable future, but as things continue to pivot towards Bitcoin and these things, would have that already in place in the future.”

Voting for SB1025 in the Arizona House of Representatives on April 28. Source: Arizona State Legislature

The approvals bring the bills closer than any other state-level initiative in the US to getting a cryptocurrency or Bitcoin strategic reserve signed into law. Similar legislation proposed in New Hampshire passed the state’s House in April and is expected to head to the Senate for a full floor vote soon.

Related: Bitcoin reserve backlash signals unrealistic industry expectations

Key takeaways: 

A week full of US macroeconomic reports could impact Bitcoin traders’ sentiment. 

Bitcoin’s rally could stall if there’s a sharp reduction in spot buy volumes.

If PCE, the ISM PMI, and jobs data align with market expectations, BTC could rally. 

Bitcoin (BTC) price could face a period of range-bound trading after managing a 10.37% rally over the past 7 days. Robust spot purchasing demand from Strategy, the spot BTC ETFs, and announcements from 21Shares and Coinbase played a role in Bitcoin’s rally to $95,700. With the exception of the April 28 announcement of a $1.42 billion BTC purchase from Strategy, a quiet week on the crypto news front could translate to a reduction in spot demand and lower support tests from Bitcoin price. 

Gold-backed cryptocurrencies have spiked in value amid the global trade war unleashed by US President Donald Trump’s April 2 tariffs.

Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) reached all-time highs on April 22, with Tether Gold touching $3,529 and Paxos Gold recording a peak of $3,520, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Two other gold-backed cryptocurrencies — Quorium (QGOLD) and Kinesis Gold (KAU) — have seen rises of 8.5% and 7.6%, respectively, in the past 30 days. All four tokens are up 40% or more in the past 12 months, CoinGecko data shows.

Related: Tether clocks $13B in 2024 profits, US bond holdings hit all-time highs

According to a report by Tether, the increased demand for XAUT is due to macroeconomic factors, such as escalating global economic uncertainty, geopolitical conflicts, and a rising demand for inflation-resistant assets.

Since US President Trump’s renewed trade war, gold has increased significantly in value. On April 2, Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when the tariffs were announced, the price of one ounce of gold was $3,115. At the time of this writing, on April 28, the ounce price is at $3,335, representing a 7% jump in less than 30 days.