Key takeaways

• SEI is up 10%, outperforming the broader cryptocurrency market.
• The coin could extend its rally towards the $0.092 daily swing high in the near term.

The cryptocurrency market opened the new weekly candle mixed as some coins rallied while others underperformed.

SEI, the native coin of the Sei blockchain, is one of the best performers among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

The coin is up by 10% in the last 24 hours and could extend its rally in the near term. Technical indicators suggest that SEI could surge past a key resistance level as the broader market remains strong. 

SEI rallies as Sei Labs completes EVM Transition

The primary catalyst behind SEI’s latest rally is the completion of its unified EVM architecture. 

The team announced over the weekend that it has completed its transition to a unified, EVM-only architecture. 

This means that exchanges and custodians supporting the SEI token need to migrate customer holdings before support for Cosmos and IBC-related functionality is deprecated.

The team’s core message: Sei EVM is not a separate chain. “It’s the same chain with a second way to interact with it,” Sei Labs said in the announcement. Any venue that treats “Sei” and “Sei EVM” as two distinct integrations needs to consolidate them into one.

The push closes out SIP-3, the May 2025 governance vote that approved Sei’s pivot to a fully EVM-only architecture. 

The transition has rolled out in stages through 2026, with EVM staking added in January, inbound IBC transfers disabled in February, and the native oracle replaced by Chainlink, Pyth, and API3 in March.

SEI bulls target the $0.080 resistance level

The SEI/USD 4H chart is bearish and inefficient thanks to Sei’s latest rally. The momentum indicators suggest that the bulls remain in control of the market.

The RSI of 70 means that SEI is approaching the overbought region, which could signal incoming selling pressure. The MACD lines are also within the positive territory, adding further confluence to the bullish narrative.

If the bullish trend persists, SEI could rally past the $0.0800 level in the near term. The swing high on the daily chart at $0.09248 could be SEI’s target in the coming days and weeks.

However, if the sellers regain control, SEI could drop to the support level at $0.07021. Losing this level could see the bears push the price lower towards the $0.06490 pyschological level. 

MARA Holdings (MARA) is scheduled to report first quarter earnings after the market close on May 11, with Wall Street analysts expecting the company to post losses on revenue and earnings (EPS) of $184.21 million and $2.34 respectively.

Results are expected to reflect the sharp decline in bitcoin prices during the first quarter, with BTC falling roughly 25% over the period, from roughly $87,000 to $67,000, creating significant mark-to-market losses on MARA’s digital asset holdings.

However, investor focus is likely to center less on short term bitcoin price volatility and more on the company’s strategic transition into artificial intelligence and high performance computing infrastructure. MARA has increasingly positioned itself as part of a broader industry shift in which bitcoin miners are leveraging their existing energy assets and data center expertise to secure more stable, long term AI-related revenue streams.

The AI transition includes FTAI Infrastructure agreeing to sell Long Ridge Energy to MARA in a $1.5 billion transaction. The deal is expected to provide MARA with long-term power-generation capacity and exposure to steadier cash flow opportunities tied to AI and data center contracts, reducing reliance on the highly cyclical bitcoin mining business, where revenues fluctuate with bitcoin prices, network difficulty, and transaction fees.

In the fourth quarter, MARA reported declining revenue of 6% year-over-year from $214 million to $206 million, though it also announced a partnership with Starwood to develop AI data centers delivering approximately one gigawatt of computing capacity in the near term.

During Q1, MARA sold 15,133 BTC, valued at approximately $1.1 billion, using proceeds to repurchase $1.0 billion of convertible notes, strengthen liquidity, and continue funding its AI expansion strategy.

The broader bitcoin mining sector is increasingly following a similar path. IREN (IREN) recently expanded its AI transition through a $3.4 billion AI cloud agreement with NVIDIA (NVDA), while also recording a $140.4 million non-cash impairment charge tied to the sale of ASIC mining hardware as it reallocates infrastructure toward AI cloud services.

In addition, HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE) announced additional investments into AI and digital infrastructure, including $3.1 million to install high speed fiber infrastructure supporting a planned 50MW AI factory.

MARA shares rose 1% to $13 in pre-market trading.

The crypto market started the week in a volatile mood, with bitcoin BTC$81,002.49 rising from $80,670 at 23:00 UTC on Sunday before topping out at $82,400 an hour later. The price subsequently dropped to trade in a fairly narrow range just beneath $81,000.

The move coincided with the weekly open of bitcoin futures on the CME and U.S. equity futures — a period that often sparks a frenzy of repositioning and a phenomenon called the “CME gap,” which occurs when the price opens at a different point to where it closed on Friday.

Due to the timing of the move, all crypto benchmarks are down on Monday with the broad CoinDesk 100 (CD100) leading the way at a 1.5% loss while the bitcoin-dominant CoinDesk 5 (CD5) dropping 0.6%.

Price action is also being dictated by geopolitical developments in Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran’s response to a peace proposal was “totally unacceptable,” leading to a rise in the price of oil and the dollar and a decline in risk assets.

Derivatives positioning

• The market-wide crypto futures open interest (OI) remains pinned just above $130 billion for the fourth straight day, pointing to a lack of fresh leverage inflows and broadly stalled momentum across the derivatives market.
• Centralized exchanges have liquidated over $400 million in leveraged futures bets, with shorts accounting for most of that amount.
• SUI’s OI has surged by 29%, validating the double-digit rise in the token’s price. This, coupled with positive funding rates and 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta, points to growing demand for bullish exposure.
• DOGE and HBAR are other notable OI gainers, while BTC and ETH futures OI remains largely steady.
• OI in futures tied to the privacy-focused ZEC token has declined by 6%, a sign of capital outflows.
• Despite the U.S. CPI and PPI releases due later this week, the market remains calm, as evidenced by bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, which is pinned near three-month lows.
• On Deribit, bitcoin calls at strikes, ranging from $81,000 to $86,000 dominate the volume rankings. Call options are inherently bullish plays on the underlying asset.
• Block flows featured bitcoin long call condors, a strategy initiated to profit from low volatility and minimal price movement in the underlying asset.

Token talk

• Venice’s VVV token more than doubled in the past month as traders reacted to a string of emissions cuts, token burns, new products and the growing demand for AI.
• The move started with supply. Venice doubled its subscription-linked burn rate in late April, with Pro, Pro+ and Max subscriptions on the platform now triggering $2, $5 and $10 VVV burns, respectively, according to VeniceStats data.
• Venice then cut annual emissions of the token, which can be used for privacy-focused artificial intelligence, from 6 million tokens to 5 million on May 1, the first step in a planned reduction to 3 million by July, according to the project.
• The rally accelerated after StrikeRobot, which develops AI software for robots, said Venice would become a primary inference API backend for its robotics products, starting with SR Agentic and SR Platform.
• Meanwhile, subscription revenue is rising. Co-founder Jesse Proudman said Monday that subscription and credit purchases hit a record, topping the prior high by 10%.
• VVV remains below its $22.5 January 2025 record. The token had fallen as much as 50% shortly after its debut amid insider-trading concerns tied to early purchases by Aerodrome Finance contributors.

Circle, issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC, posted estimate-beating first-quarter earnings as revenue rose 20% and it raised $222 million for its Arc blockchain network in a presale of the ARC token.

Earnings per share (EPS) of 21 cents beat analyst estimates of 17 cents, while revenue rose 20% to a less-than-forecast $694 million. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) grew 24% from a year earlier to $151 million, the New York-based company reported.

USDC onchain transaction volume jumped over 260% from the year-earlier quarter to $21.5 trillion, and USDC in circulation increased 28% to $77 billion.

The ARC token presale values the project at $3 billion. The fundraising round included investment from a mix of Wall Street heavyweights and crypto-native firms, including BlackRock, Apollo Funds, a16z crypto, ARK Invest, CoinDesk’s parent company Bullish, Haun Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange and Standard Chartered Ventures.

The fundraising marks Circle’s most ambitious expansion beyond USDC and payments infrastructure, pushing the stablecoin issuer deeper into the race to build blockchain infrastructure for institutional finance.

Circle also published the Arc whitepaper on Monday, outlining ARC as a “native coordination asset” designed to support governance, validator security and network operations across the chain.

Arc, which began testing in October, is being positioned as a blockchain optimized for stablecoin-based capital markets and regulated financial activity, which includes tokenized assets, cross-border settlement and onchain finance.

Unlike USDC, which functions as a dollar-pegged payment token, ARC appears intended to play a role closer to ether (ETH) on Ethereum or SOL on Solana — helping coordinate the network’s economic and security model.

CRCL shares were nearly 1.2% higher at $115 in pre-market trading at around 7:30 a.m. ET.

UPDATE (May 11, 11:20 UTC): Adds Circle’s first-quarter earnings report information and restructures article to lead with earnings.

Immediately after Morgan Stanley announced it was rolling out E*Trade, charging a mere 50 basis points undercutting established rivals Coinbase, Robinhood and Schwab, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas said “crypto exchanges should be scared.”

Others were less blunt, saying the Wall Street giant’s “isn’t entering crypto to complement Coinbase—it’s entering to replace it…”

The battle for cheap crypto trading resembles the trading fee race when spot ETFs launched in 2024, which saw providers begin high, offering 50 basis points before Morgan Stanley undercut them all with a 14 basis point offering.

In the long run, this means that trading crypto will be cheaper, where the clear winners will be retail traders, while crypto exchanges see their margins significantly trimmed, potentially affecting the likes of Coinbase, who recently cited financial issues as a reason for to reduce its workforce by 14%.

When announcing E*Trade, Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management, suggested the move was more about dominance than control. “This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate.

“In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators.” He added: “It’s going to be very competitive in the next couple of years,” explaining the move is aimed at ensuring its 8.6 million clients remain within its banking system instead of resorting to other platforms as the demand for crypto increases.

In his X post last week, Balchunas echoed Finn’s sentiment, framing the Wall Street giant’s move as a “SHOTS FIRED” moment. “Morgan Stanley is rolling out crypto trading on its E*Trade platform for 50bps per trade, undercutting Schwab’s 75bps (who undercut Coinbase).”

He said that based on his knowledge of how Schwab works, it will “likely won’t let this stand. Others will probably undercut too.” He also said that “by the time the dust settles it’ll be pretty dirt cheap to trade crypto everywhere.” Before concluding by saying “this is why (traditional financial) TradFi is no joke and crypto exchanges should be scared.”

However, crypto-native leaders rebuffed the “doom and gloom” narrative as U.S.-centric.

“While we respect Eric Balchunas’s insights on TradFi’s push into crypto, the perspective feels somewhat localized to the U.S. market and oversimplified for quick engagements on X,” said Kevin Lee, chief business officer at Gate, which ranks seventh on Coingecko with a 24 hour volume of nearly $2 billion.

Lee also told CoinDesk that Balchunas’ comments do not “fully capture the mature, global evolution of the crypto industry.”

The Gate CBO explained that the recent moves by the Wall Street giants to cut spot trading fees reflects the ongoing reduction of commissions that is normal to see when competition intensifies.

“This mirrors long-established patterns in equities markets, where fierce competition naturally compresses fees,” Lee said. “Smart platforms moved on long ago from fee-only models to diversified revenue streams including staking, structured products, institutional services, and ecosystem growth.”

Georgii Verbitskii, derivatives trader and founder of TYMIO, a non-custodial decentralized finance (DeFI) protocol, told CoinDesk he believes Morgan Stanley’s move into crypto trading is a good sign.

“This is clearly positive for crypto adoption overall,” Verbitskii said. “Morgan Stanley bringing crypto trading to millions of brokerage users is another sign that digital assets are becoming part of mainstream investment infrastructure, although the 50 bps fee itself is not especially competitive.”

Keneabasi Umoren, a crypto market analyst and Web3 researcher, recently told CoinDesk, he does not believe Wall Street will “kill exchanges, but it will squeeze U.S. spot-trading and custody revenue and push exchanges further into derivatives, DeFi and global markets.”

Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S., says it will take a back seat to the Global Dollar stablecoin (USDG) consortium, which includes Robinhood and Kraken.

USDG, which has a circulating supply of around $3 billion, is issued by Paxos Digital Singapore and supervised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Other members include Galaxy Digital, OKX, Visa, Worldpay and Bullish (the owner of CoinDesk).

“We’re still supportive of it, and want to see it succeed, and are still part of the thing,” said Anchorage Digital co-founder and CEO Nathan McCauley in an interview. “But maybe not as up-front of a role as before.”

McCauley said that previously, Anchorage might have been boosting USDG specifically, but now the firm will take a more neutral approach. “I think one of the things you’re gonna see from us is increased neutrality on the stablecoins. It just makes sense to be neutral and not specifically be pushing any one stablecoin.”

Anchorage recently mentioned as many as 20 banks and tech giants are currently looking to issue stablecoins with the San Francisco-based custody firm. In April, Anchorage said it would partner with stablecoin issuance platform M0, which works with MetaMask and Bridge.

“With us becoming a white-label stablecoin issuer for so many different groups, you start to think about what’s the incentive structure, and is everything still aligned,” McCauley said.

Paxos did not respond to requests for comment by press time.