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According to CoinDesk, the open interest (OI) of the Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund IBIT under BlackRock once surged to $27.61 billion, surpassing the $26.9 billion scale of the Bitcoin options market on the crypto derivatives platform Deribit for the first time. Analysts believe this milestone indicates that the institutionalization process of the Bitcoin market in the United States is accelerating.Additionally, according to Volmex data, the open interest volume of IBIT call options suggests that its call options primarily expect the Bitcoin trading price to rise to $109,709, which is about 41% higher than the current market price of $77,400. Furthermore, the average expiration date of IBIT options is also about two months longer than that of Deribit, indicating stronger bullish sentiment and a preference for longer-term holdings.

Project Eleven today awarded the Q-Day prize to researcher Giancarlo Lelli, who successfully derived a 15-digit elliptic curve private key from a public key using publicly accessible quantum hardware, marking the largest scale demonstration of its kind to date, a 512-fold increase from the 6-digit demonstration in September 2025.Lelli used a variant of Shor's algorithm for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, which is the mathematical foundation of the Bitcoin signature scheme, with the awarded hardware featuring approximately 70 qubits. Currently, no known quantum computer can crack real Bitcoin wallets, and the security of Bitcoin's 256-bit elliptic curve remains far beyond current quantum capabilities. Notably, Google lowered its resource estimates for ECDLP-256 on March 31 and set a target for the migration to quantum cryptography after 2029, followed by Cloudflare, and the UK's NCSC also set migration milestones from 2028 to 2035.On-chain data shows that approximately 6.93 million BTC are at potential quantum risk due to exposed public keys. The Bitcoin community has proposed BIP 360 and BIP 361 to promote the migration to quantum-resistant output types, but the coordination challenges of a decentralized network remain the biggest hurdle.

Gate Research Institute released a market forecast report titled "Polymarket Growth Accelerates, Gate's Layout for New Entry into Prediction Markets," which dissects trading volume, fee mechanisms, and market structure. The report points out that Polymarket's trading volume and active users continue to grow, and the platform has evolved from early on-chain experiments into an event trading market with real liquidity and revenue capabilities. Overall growth is driven by political, sports, and geopolitical events, and user retention may decline during the phase when hot topics fade.Fees and revenues are rising rapidly, driven on one hand by expanding trading demand and on the other by the expansion of the fee scope and changes in the fee structure. Revenue growth is directly related to rule adjustments. Platform trading is highly concentrated in a few high-interest sectors, and the long-tail market contributes limited overall liquidity.Gate has integrated a Polymarket entry in the app, providing two interaction modes: prediction mode and trading mode. Users can participate using USDT through their exchange accounts or use USDC on Polygon via a Web3 wallet. The report believes that prediction markets are evolving along two parallel paths: the integration of on-chain open infrastructure and centralized products. Its long-term potential depends on the continuous stability of event supply, regulatory environment, and user behavior.

According to Cointelegraph, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated in the Senate that it is crucial to legislate on the structure of the cryptocurrency market, emphasizing that "the United States is a global technology leader and should also be a global payments leader."

Chief Economist Fu Peng of New Fire Group delivered a speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Institutional Digital Wealth Management Summit, stating that the integration of traditional financial institutions and the cryptocurrency market will herald the arrival of a new era in the market. The participants who will truly succeed in the future are those who can quickly complete their transformation at critical turning points.Fu Peng cited the Cold War, oil crisis, and the simultaneous rise of computer and semiconductor technology in the 1970s and 1980s as examples, pointing out that technological advancements and global order turmoil often go hand in hand, with risks and opportunities always accompanying each other. He believes that AI and data computing power are now widely recognized as the core productive forces of the next era, indicating that the first half of the cryptocurrency industry has essentially ended, and the industry is at a critical stage of reconstruction and rebirth.Looking ahead, Fu Peng predicts that stablecoins will take on payment functions, Bitcoin will evolve into a core asset with both value storage and financial transaction attributes, and a brand new chapter of the era is about to begin.

According to CoinDesk, the prediction market platform Kalshi is preparing to launch cryptocurrency trading in the United States, expanding beyond its core prediction market business. According to insiders, the platform plans to initially introduce perpetual contracts linked to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.This move will put Kalshi in more direct competition with cryptocurrency platforms like Coinbase. Coinbase currently does not offer true perpetual contracts in the U.S., but has launched "perpetual-like" futures contracts with long durations and has expressed intentions to introduce more advanced derivatives products within the U.S.Kalshi holds several licenses from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and has recently been approved to offer margin trading, positioning it to enter the derivatives market. Insiders say the company expects to start with cryptocurrency-linked perpetual contracts and may expand this model to other asset classes in the future.Kalshi's competitor Polymarket also announced on X plans to launch perpetual futures on its platform, but did not disclose further details. A video in the tweet shows that users will be allowed to trade leveraged long and short positions on assets like gold, NVIDIA, BTC, AAPL, and indicates that registration will provide early access.

ChainCatcher reported live that Ru Haiyang, CEO of HashKey Exchange Group, delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, focusing on three key themes: RWA, payments, and Asian connectivity. He announced that HashKey Exchange officially launched Hong Kong's first physical gold ETF that day, fully compliant with trading and custody regulations in Hong Kong. He also revealed that HashKey has received approval from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to jointly issue Asia's first true co-branded credit card with Shanghai Commercial Bank.Regarding industry trends, he pointed out that DTCC has received a no-action letter from the U.S. SEC to intervene in the custody and settlement of tokenized assets, Kraken has become the first cryptocurrency institution to connect to the Federal Reserve's FedWire, and Mastercard has acquired the UK blockchain payment company BVNK at an $1.8 billion valuation, indicating that traditional payment institutions have recognized the irreversible trend.In terms of expansion in Asia, he announced that HashKey officially announced its investment in the Vietnamese market on April 10, planning to jointly invest in VPBank, one of Vietnam's largest commercial banks, to help it become one of the first licensed exchanges. HashKey has also signed memorandums of understanding with leading Asian institutions such as Coins.ph in the Philippines, Indodex in Indonesia, Hata in Malaysia, and Bitazza in Thailand to explore cooperation in liquidity integration, cross-border payments, stablecoins, and asset tokenization distribution.

At the "Crypto 2026: From Cryptocurrency to Smart Economy" themed forum held in Hong Kong, Gongye Feng, co-founder and CEO of Monera Digital, delivered a keynote speech titled "AI Empowered Private Banking for the Smart Economy."Feng pointed out that what disappeared after 2022 was not the demand for digital assets, but the market's confidence in the ways capital could enter. Monera Digital positions itself as an AI private bank for the smart economy, with the core not being to use AI as traders, but to act as an accelerator, compressing the research, testing, and iteration cycles from months to days.He emphasized that risk control must be institutionalized rather than personalized. Monera has built four lines of defense: source constraints on exposure and collateral, automated clearing and margin management, complete segregation of client assets, and eliminating maturity mismatches while maintaining liquidity buffers. Additionally, AI plays the role of a 24/7 digital CRO, achieving a leap from passive monitoring to proactive warning.In terms of service model, Monera does not operate as a pure technology platform, but insists on "anti-AI illusion," where AI is responsible for optimization and efficiency, while trust, responsibility, and continuity of relationships are still borne by humans. Feng believes that the prerequisite for crypto assets to truly become configurable assets is to translate complexity into clear, continuous, and trustworthy private banking services.

Recently, USDD disclosed its performance data for the first quarter of 2026: the revenue for this quarter reached $6.3 million, a quarter-on-quarter increase of 66.6%; profit reached $6.14 million, a quarter-on-quarter increase of 77.9%; expenses decreased to $160,000, a quarter-on-quarter decrease of 51.6%; the treasury balance increased by 77.9% on a quarter-on-quarter basis; the total treasury balance rose to $13.91 million. The growth in performance is mainly attributed to the continuous expansion of the ecological landscape, collaboration with Binance Wallet, GateDEX, Bitget Wallet, and the optimization of TRX and sTRX treasury parameters, which improved capital efficiency.At the same time, a more diversified capital allocation further enhanced revenue resilience. While maintaining zero systemic risk, USDD is accelerating into a new phase of high-quality growth.

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken's parent company Payward announced that it will acquire 100% of the digital asset derivatives platform Bitnomial for up to $550 million (cash + stock). The transaction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.Bitnomial is the first crypto-native platform to obtain all three U.S. derivatives licenses (designated contract market, derivatives clearing organization, and futures commission merchant). This acquisition will help Payward quickly gain a complete compliant derivatives infrastructure, significantly accelerating its expansion in the U.S. market. After the transaction is completed, Bitnomial's clearing and trading capabilities will be integrated with platforms such as Kraken and NinjaTrader, offering products like spot margin, perpetual contracts, and options to U.S. customers, and will be regulated by the CFTC.This acquisition will also expand Payward Services, allowing banks, fintech companies, and brokerages to access the U.S. compliant derivatives market through a single API. Industry insiders believe that with the market warming up and valuations recovering, merger and acquisition activities in the crypto industry are on the rise, as leading institutions are accelerating their transformation into comprehensive trading platforms for institutional clients by acquiring key capabilities such as compliance, custody, and derivatives.

HashKey Chain announced a strategic cooperation with the compliance brokerage infrastructure platform HabitTrade. The two parties will collaborate on the on-chain integration of quality assets and on-chain financial infrastructure, promoting the issuance and circulation of compliant assets.As the first tangible progress, HSKSwap has integrated the open-source securities tokenization protocol Stove Protocol under HabitTrade, supporting on-chain tokenized trading of assets including U.S. stocks.HashKey Chain stated that this cooperation will continuously introduce compliant assets backed by real assets, further improving the on-chain financial infrastructure. In the future, both parties will expand into more asset categories and explore cross-market circulation and on-chain financial application scenarios, promoting the integration of traditional capital markets and the on-chain ecosystem.

Bitfinex released a report indicating that tokenized commodities are moving from early experimentation to practical application, becoming an important manifestation of the reconstruction of real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain. The core of this shift is not to create new demand, but to reshape existing market infrastructure.Data shows that the total market value of tokenized commodities has reached approximately $7 billion, growing nearly 600% since the beginning of 2025. Current major participants include crypto-native investors and high-net-worth individuals. Amid increasing geopolitical volatility, tokenization is enhancing asset liquidity and risk management flexibility. Gold remains the primary entry point, with Tether Gold accounting for nearly 40% market share.The report points out that on-chain gold possesses characteristics such as real-time transfer and global auditability, making it more suitable as collateral compared to physical assets, and it can overcome traditional trading hours and settlement limitations. In addition to gold, tokenized commodities have expanded into areas such as oil, natural gas, and agricultural products, with soybeans and soybean oil each around $400 million, and green financing-related exposure around $850 million, indicating that this model has cross-category expansion potential.At the same time, the traceability of blockchain has also enhanced supply chain transparency, meeting regulatory and ESG requirements. Bitfinex believes that in the future, the focus of tokenization will shift from precious metals to industrial products such as copper and oil, achieving a transition from "product innovation" to "market infrastructure upgrade" by improving collateral efficiency, asset circulation speed, and transparency.

As AI moves towards the era of autonomous collaborative agents, the B.AI platform has officially launched, dedicated to providing key "financial infrastructure" capabilities for deep participation of AI agents in value exchange, breaking the bottleneck of the industry's shift from model capabilities to underlying support. As the core infrastructure linking agents and the economic system, B.AI will deeply analyze how it reshapes the economic role of agents through a special Space on April 14 at 8 PM. By building seamless financial access and collaboration standards, B.AI is accelerating the realization of the AGI vision with forward-looking technological layouts, opening new opportunities for intelligent productivity for global users.Users are encouraged to follow the official accounts @sunpumpmeme and @Agent_SunGenX, retweet the post, and @ three friends. The official account will randomly select 5 lucky users from the participants to receive a reward of 10 USDT each.

According to an article in the American Bankers Association (ABA) Journal, experts including the ABA's chief economist point out that the recent research report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) on the issuance of yield from payment stablecoins raises the wrong questions and may mislead policymakers.The CEA report mainly explores "how prohibiting the issuance of yield from payment stablecoins will affect bank lending," concluding that banning yields would only increase bank lending by about $1.2 billion, with minimal impact.However, the ABA believes that the real policy concern is not the consequences of "prohibition," but the risks that may arise from "allowing" the issuance of yield from payment stablecoins: accelerating deposit outflows, allowing yields to stimulate households and businesses to move funds from bank deposits (especially community banks) to stablecoins, which would have a significant impact when the market size expands to $1-2 trillion. ABA analysis shows that loans in Iowa alone could decrease by $4.4 billion to $8.7 billion as a result.Impact on community banks: Deposit outflows will force community banks to replace funding with higher-cost wholesale financing (such as Federal Home Loan Bank advances), raising their funding costs and thereby reducing loans to local households and small businesses. It is not a harmless "reshuffling": The CEA believes that deposits are merely "reshuffled" within the banking system, with overall impact being minimal.However, the ABA points out that deposits flowing from community banks to a few large institutions or stablecoin reserve accounts will harm sectors that rely on relationship-based bank lending. The ABA believes that prohibiting the issuance of yield from payment stablecoins is a prudent protective measure that allows stablecoins to mature as a tool for payment innovation rather than becoming a source of economic risk that substitutes for insured deposits.

Bitget's transparency report for the first quarter of 2026 released today shows that user trading behavior is accelerating its shift from single cryptocurrency assets to multi-asset portfolios. By the end of the first quarter, the trading volume of non-cryptocurrency assets such as commodities accounted for 20%-40%, while the proportion of cryptocurrency assets fell from its dominant position at the beginning of the year to 60%-80%. The fluctuation of this data marks that a panoramic asset portfolio has become a core strategy for high-net-worth investors.On the product and ecosystem level, Bitget released the white paper for the panoramic exchange UEX in the first quarter, further clarifying the direction of integration of cryptocurrency assets, tokenized assets, and AI-driven trading under a unified framework. At the same time, the platform continues to strengthen its AI trading infrastructure, successively launching Agent Hub and GetClaw, promoting the evolution of AI from an auxiliary tool to an execution system, allowing agents to access real-time market data, identify trading signals, and execute operations autonomously under established parameters.Bitget CEO Gracy Chen pointed out: "The boundaries between the cryptocurrency market and traditional finance are rapidly dissolving, and the explosive growth of CFD business indicates the arrival of a unified market. Users are no longer making binary asset choices but are engaging in efficiency games with diverse assets under the same logical system."

JP Richardson, CEO of Exodus, stated that this year institutions are accelerating their entry into the cryptocurrency market, while retail participation has declined, indicating that the market may be entering a new phase dominated by institutions.He pointed out that the current market capitalization of stablecoins has reached an all-time high, and traditional financial institutions are continuing to make moves, including launching Bitcoin ETFs and establishing crypto-related business departments. Michaël van de Poppe, founder of MN Fund, also mentioned that under inflation and cost-of-living pressures, retail funding is constrained, and this cycle may exhibit characteristics of being institution-led and lasting longer. Additionally, CryptoQuant data shows that the inflow of funds into small accounts holding less than 1 BTC on Binance has dropped to a nearly nine-year low, indicating a decline in retail participation.

According to Cointelegraph, about two years away from Bitcoin's fifth halving, mining companies are facing a more challenging operating environment than the halving in 2024. At that time, the block reward will drop from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC, compounded by record-high network hash rates, rising energy costs, and a more cautious capital market, significantly compressing the industry's profit margins.On the balance sheet front, several leading mining companies have begun to actively deleverage. MARA Holdings sold over 15,000 Bitcoins in March to reduce leverage, Riot Platforms sold over 3,700 in the first quarter, Cango sold 2,000 to repay Bitcoin collateralized debt, and Bitdeer's Bitcoin holdings dropped to zero on February 20.Industry insiders generally hold a cautious outlook. Cango's communications head, Juliet Ye, stated, "The middle ground has almost disappeared; operators with scale and diversified layouts can cope, while those lacking these conditions will struggle in the next halving." GoMining CEO Mark Zalan pointed out, "Capital discipline is now more important than maximizing hash power," and new deployment projects must meet stricter return thresholds.In terms of business models, pure block rewards have become "an increasingly thin business," with strong operators moving towards power and data center businesses, exploring additional revenue through grid peak shaving and waste heat utilization. Cango is transitioning to a dual-line model focusing on both computing power and AI workloads, with Ye stating, "The truly important facilities in five years will be those that can do multiple things simultaneously."