Crypto Markets Play It Cool—But the Blood’s Already Dried

Major tokens hover in cautious equilibrium today—no dramatic plunges, no reckless rallies. Yet the scars of last week’s liquidation cascade remain fresh.

• Price Action: BTC/ETH trade sideways as leveraged positions get a breather

• Market Psychology: Traders eyeing the $60K BTC support like nervous bouncers at a bull market speakeasy

• Institutional Watch: BlackRock’s IBIT sees inflows despite the chop—because nothing soothes panic like an ETF wrapper

The real damage? Another 10% of retail traders just learned what ’max pain’ means the hard way. Wall Street’s quant shops? Already placing bets on the next cycle.

What to Watch

• Crypto:
  • April 30, 9:30 a.m.: ProShares will debut three ETFs that will provide leveraged and inverse exposure to XRP: ​​the ProShares Ultra XRP ETF, the ProShares Short XRP ETF and the ProShares UltraShort XRP ETF.
  • April 30, 10:03 a.m.: Gnosis Chain (GNO), an Ethereum sister chain, will activate the Pectra hard fork on its mainnet at slot 21,405,696, epoch 1,337,856.
  • May 1: Coinbase Asset Management will introduce the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund (CBYF), which is aimed at non-U.S. investors.
  • May 1: Hippo Protocol starts up its own layer-1 blockchain mainnet built on Cosmos SDK and completes a migration from Ethereum’s ERC-20 HPO token to its native HP token, enabling staking and governance.
  • May 1, 9 a.m.: Constellation Network (DAG) activates the Tessellation v3 upgrade on its mainnet, introducing delegated staking, node collateral, token locking and new transaction types to enhance network security, scalability and functionality.
  • May 1, 11 a.m.: THORChain activates its v3.5 mainnet upgrade, adding the TCY token to convert $200 million in debt into equity. TCY holders earn 10% of network revenue, while native RUNE remains the protocol’s security and governance token. TCY activates May 5.
  • May 5, 3 a.m.: IOTA’s Rebased network upgrade starts. Rebased moves IOTA to a new network, boosting capacity to as many as 50,000 transactions per second, offering staking rewards of 10%-15% a year and adding support for MoveVM smart contracts.
  • May 5, 10 a.m.: The Crescendo network upgrade goes live on the Kaspa (KAS) mainnet. This upgrade boosts the network’s performance by increasing the block production rate to 10 blocks per second from 1 block per second.
• Macro
  • April 30, 8 a.m.: Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) releases March unemployment rate data.
    • Unemployment Rate Est. 7% vs. Prev. 6.8%
  • April 30, 8 a.m.: Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography releases (preliminary) Q1 GDP growth data.
    • GDP Growth Rate QoQ Prev. -0.6%
    • GDP Growth Rate YoY Prev. 0.5%
  • April 30, 8:30 a.m.: The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases (advance) Q1 GDP growth data.
    • GDP Growth Rate QoQ Est. 0.4% vs. Prev. 2.4%
  • April 30, 10 a.m.: The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases March consumer income and expenditure data.
    • Core PCE Price Index MoM Est. 0.1% vs. Prev. 0.4%
    • Core PCE Price Index YoY Est. 2.6% vs. Prev. 2.8%
    • PCE Price Index MoM Est. 0% vs. Prev. 0.3%
    • PCE Price Index YoY Est. 2.2% vs. Prev. 2.5%
    • Personal Income MoM Est. 0.4% vs. Prev. 0.8%
    • Personal Spending MoM Est. 0.6% vs. Prev. 0.4%
  • May 1, 8:30 a.m.: The U.S. Department of Labor releases unemployment insurance data for the week ended April 26.
    • Initial Jobless Claims Est. 224K vs. Prev. 222K
  • May 1, 9:30 a.m.: S&P Global releases Canada April purchasing managers’ index (PMI) data.
    • Manufacturing PMI Prev. 46.3
  • May 1, 10:00 a.m.: Institute for Supply Management (ISM) releases U.S. April economic activity data.
    • Manufacturing PMI Est. 48 vs. Prev. 49
• Earnings (Estimates based on FactSet data)
  • April 30: Robinhood Markets (HOOD), post-market, $0.33
  • May 1: Block (XYZ), post-market, $0.97
  • May 1: Reddit (RDDT), post-market, $0.02
  • May 1: Riot Platforms (RIOT), post-market, $-0.23
  • May 1: Strategy (MSTR), post-market, $-0.11
  • May 8: Coinbase Global (COIN), post-market, $2.08
  • May 8: Hut 8 (HUT), pre-market
  • May 8: MARA Holdings (MARA), post-market

Token Events

• Governance votes & calls
  • Compound DAO is voting on moving 35,200 COMP ($1.5 million) into a multisig safe to test selling covered calls on COMP for USDC, lend that USDC in Compound for extra yield, then use the returns to buy back COMP and repeat — targeting a roughly 15 % annual gain. Voting ends May 2.
  • April 30, 12 p.m.: Helium to host a community call meeting.
  • May 5, 4 p.m.: Livepeer (LPT) to host a Treasury Talk session on Discord.
• Unlocks
  • May 1: Sui (SUI) to unlock 2.28% of its circulating supply worth $261.2 million.
  • May 1: ZetaChain (ZETA) to unlock 5.67% of its circulating supply worth $12.31 million.
  • May 2: Ethena (ENA) to unlock 0.73% of its circulating supply worth $12.99 million.
  • May 7: Kaspa (KAS) to unlock 0.56% of its circulating supply worth $13.08 million.
  • May 9: Movement (MOVA) to unlock 2.04% of its circulating supply worth $12.31 million.
• Token Launches
  • May 2: Binance to delist Alpaca Finance (ALPACA), PlayDapp (PDA), Viberate (VIB), and Wing Finance (WING).
  • May 5: Sonic (S) to be listed on Kraken.

Conferences

CoinDesk’s Consensus is taking place in Toronto on May 14-16. Use code DAYBOOK and save 15% on passes.

• Day 4 of 4: Web Summit Rio 2025
• Day 1 of 2: TOKEN2049 (Dubai)
• May 6-7: Financial Times Digital Assets Summit (London)
• May 11-17: Canada Crypto Week (Toronto)
• May 12-13: Dubai FinTech Summit
• May 12-13: Filecoin (FIL) Developer Summit (Toronto)
• May 12-13: Latest in DeFi Research (TLDR) Conference (New York)
• May 12-14: ACI’s 9th Annual Legal, Regulatory, and Compliance Forum on Fintech & Emerging Payment Systems (New York)
• May 13: Blockchain Futurist Conference (Toronto)
• May 13: ETHWomen (Toronto)

Token Talk

By Shaurya Malwa

• Solana-based Housecoin (HOUSE) zoomed to nearly $100 million market cap early Wednesday driven by a 24-hour price bump of 63% that brought its price to just under a cent.
• HOUSE has surged more than 900% in the past three weeks, mainly on niche popularity in crypto circles and mentions from well-followed X accounts.
• The trending memecoin is a satire on the real estate market, where prime locations are priced out for most of the general populace.
• Holding HOUSE is, jokingly, considered by its cult to be holding actual property even though the token is intrinsically valueless and not backed by any real-world assets.
• While its momentum and accessibility offer trading opportunities, its volatility, lack of clear fundamentals, and memecoin risks demand caution.

Derivatives Positioning

• Among large-cap assets on Binance, PEPE and ADA hold negative funding APRs of -14.7% and -11.2%, respectively, according to Velo data. In contrast, TON, XLM, and XMR have seen funding APRs spike to 11%, highlighting a clear divergence in speculative positioning across major tokens.
• In terms of open interest, BSW, DRIFT and PROMPT are among the top gainers, with daily open interest rising by 61%, 58%, and 33%, respectively — signaling idiosyncratic, intraday interest in these assets.
• ALPACA, a BNB Chain asset, recorded over $55 million in short liquidations in the past 24 hours. That’s the largest of any asset, according to CoinGlass data. The surge followed heavy short positioning after Binance’s delisting announcement a week ago, before a 550% price rally triggered widespread liquidations.

Market Movements

• BTC is down 0.19% from 4 p.m. ET Tuesday at $94,915.28 (24hrs: unchanged)
• ETH is down 0.57% at $1,805.20 (24hrs: -1.48%)
• CoinDesk 20 is down 0.51% at 2,751.84 (24hrs: -1.27%)
• Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is up 19 bps at 2.99%
• BTC funding rate is at 0.0008% (0.8377% annualized) on Binance

• DXY is up 0.19% at 99.43
• Gold is down 1.16% at $3,278.15/oz
• Silver is down 1.64% at $32.36/oz
• Nikkei 225 closed +0.57% at 36,045.38
• Hang Seng closed +0.51% at 22,119.41
• FTSE is up 0.13% at 8,474.22
• Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.24% at 5,174.41
• DJIA closed on Tuesday +0.75% at 40,527.62
• S&P 500 closed +0.56% at 5,560.83
• Nasdaq closed +0.55% at 17,461.32
• S&P/TSX Composite Index closed +0.31% at 24,874.48
• S&P 40 Latin America closed unchanged at 2,548.27
• U.S. 10-year Treasury rate is down 5 bps at 4.17%
• E-mini S&P 500 futures are down 0.28% at 5,568.25
• E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are down 0.44% at 19,556.00
• E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are down 0.22% at 40,596.00

Bitcoin Stats

• BTC Dominance: 64.54 (0.16%)
• Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.01902 (-0.31%)
• Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 837 EH/s
• Hashprice (spot): $49.08
• Total Fees: 6.17 BTC / $585,773.63
• CME Futures Open Interest: 134,825 BTC
• BTC priced in gold: 28.9 oz
• BTC vs gold market cap: 8.19%

Technical Analysis

• With bitcoin and most digital assets breaching key high-timeframe liquidity levels, a market pullback now appears likely.
• Solana, along with many altcoins, has broken its weekly market structure with a strong upward move that swept liquidity at $153 before facing rejection at the 100-day exponential moving average (EMA) level.
• Bulls will want the price action to print a higher low with the 100-day EMA on the weekly time frame sitting at $137, aligning with the weekly orderblock of demand.

Crypto Equities

• Strategy (MSTR): closed at on Tuesday $381.45 (+3.3%), down 0.41% at $379.88 in pre-market
• Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $206.13 (+0.42%)
• Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at $21.09 (-0.57%)
• MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $14.22 (+1.5%), down 0.28% at $14.18
• Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $7.42 (-2.75%), down 0.40% at $7.39
• Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $8.29 (+0.61%), down 0.48% at $8.25
• CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $8.44 (-1.52%), down 0.24% at $8.42
• CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $14.19 (-0.98%)
• Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $33.97 (-3.96%), up 4.95% at $35.65
• Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $40.97 (-2.87%), up 2.49% at $41.99

ETF Flows

• Daily net flow: $172.8 million
• Cumulative net flows: $39.16 billion
• Total BTC holdings ~ 1.15 million

• Daily net flow: $18.4 million
• Cumulative net flows: $2.50 billion
• Total ETH holdings ~ 3.44 million

Source: Farside Investors

Overnight Flows

Chart of the Day

• Alpaca Finance (ALPACA) emerged as the top gainer on centralized exchanges with a price that’s surged nearly 2,500% over the past seven days.
• The rally is driven by a significant short squeeze, following heavy short positioning in the wake of Binance’s April 24 delisting announcement.
• As a result, the token surged to a multiyear high of $1.375.

While You Were Sleeping

• Telegram’s TON Takes On Real World Assets With Libre’s $500M Tokenized Bond Fund (CoinDesk): Libre plans to tokenize $500 million in Telegram debt as the Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) on the TON blockchain.
• BlackRock Looking to Tokenize Shares of Its $150B Treasury Trust Fund, SEC Filing Shows (CoinDesk): The new "DLT" shares are expected to be bought and held through BNY, which plans to use blockchain technology to keep a mirror record of ownership for its clients.
• SEC Delays Dogecoin and XRP ETF Decisions (CoinDesk): The SEC delayed decisions on the Bitwise DOGE ETF and the Franklin XRP Fund until June 15 and June 17, respectively.
• Investors Turn to Emerging Market Debt After Trump Tariffs Hit U.S. Treasuries (CNBC): As confidence in Treasuries as a safe haven weakens, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa could see more bond demand, said Carol Lye, citing yield premiums and potential currency appreciation.
• Chinese Investors Pile Into Gold Funds at Record Pace (Financial Times): China’s gold ETF holdings have doubled to 6% of the global total, with $7.4 billion in inflows this month accounting for more than half of global demand.
• Asia Hedge Funds Add Japan, India After Tariff Shock, Says Morgan Stanley (Reuters): Funds increased exposure to Japanese tech, industrials and materials while retreating from Chinese consumer shares, as global investors expect Washington to strike trade deals with Tokyo and New Delhi.

In the Ether