Spring is in the air
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 21st April 2025.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Dollar Bruised, Bitcoin Bounces
Bitcoin, freed from the consolidation-phase yoke of the $83K-$87K range, has risen to nearly $88K. It happened on Easter. As of early Monday, BTC was roughly $87,400, up 4% since yesterday morning.
A slew of other large cryptos rebounded in spring-loaded fashion in the past day. They include XRP, Cardano and Dogecoin. The latter two coins recorded 24-hour gains of 5%. XRP is +4%, getting itself back in the green on a weekly basis.
Gold prices continued to surge, notching yet another new record high, "amid concerns over Federal Reserve independence," CoinDesk said.
Rumblings that President Trump possibly could seek to oust Fed Chair Jerome Powell helped push the dollar index (DXY) down to a three-year low. Periods of dollar weakness has at times in the past correlated with periods of BTC strength.
What's down
Hacked Funds Plunged Into Darkness
Untraceable. That, unfortunately, is the status of $400M lost in the Bybit hack, the exchange's CEO said.
"The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers, then through bridges to P2P and OTC platforms," Ben Zhou said on X on Monday.
The hack was two months ago. It resulted in half-a-million ETH worth a grand total of $1.4B getting drained from a cold wallet. A notorious North Korea-linked criminal enterprise, Lazarus Group, has been fingered as the culprit.
Zhou outlined what has been uncovered about a complex conversion process. Multiple cross-chain swaps and hundreds of wallets were involved in the illicit scheme (CoinDesk).
What's next
Ethereum Gets Its Priorities In Order
Ethereum's leadership structure shifted last month. Its research focus is also shifting, per an X post from Tomasz Stanczak, the Ethereum Foundation's co-executive director.
The foundation, he specified, will concentrate on layer-1 scaling, support for layer-2 scaling, and user experience improvements such as interoperability (Cointelegraph).
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is now spending more time going research and exploration, as opposed to dealing with day-to-day tasks.
Earlier this month, Buterin proposed the introduction of core features that would by default anonymize user transactions. Additionally, Buterin, in his just published "Long-term L1 execution layer proposal," suggested a change in the Ethereum Virtual Machine’s (EVM) contract language to improve the efficiency and speed of the blockchain’s execution layer.
Buterin argues in favor of using the open-source RISC-V instruction-set architecture. "It makes sense," chimed in a chief rival, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson, who by way of a simple social media post placed "two of the crypto sector’s most prominent protocol architects into unexpected alignment," Bitcoinist pointed out.
Stanczak said Buterin’s proposals are conversation starters, not edicts from on high, but Stanczak also concedes they will “always carry weight.”
