Crypto World
Zscaler (ZS) Stock Plummets 8% Following BTIG Downgrade Amid Competitive Pressures
Key Highlights
- Shares of Zscaler (ZS) declined approximately 8% on April 9, 2026, reaching a 52-week low of $127.88
- BTIG analyst downgraded the stock from Buy to Neutral, removing it from the firm’s preferred picks
- Research involving five industry sources highlighted intensifying competitive threats from Cloudflare and Netskope
- The stock has tumbled 39% since the start of the year and 56% over the previous half-year period
- BTIG lowered its fiscal 2027 ARR projection to $4.355B, trailing Street expectations of $4.447B
Shares of Zscaler experienced a significant decline of approximately 8% during Wednesday’s trading session on April 9, sliding to a 52-week low of $127.88. The sharp downturn followed a rating cut by BTIG analyst Gray Powell, who moved the stock from Buy to Neutral and eliminated it from the firm’s top picks roster for the first half of 2026.
Powell’s rating adjustment stemmed from proprietary research conducted with five industry sources throughout the previous week. Although near-term business trends appeared relatively steady, the outlook for the coming six to twelve months revealed more cautious sentiment among the majority of contacts surveyed.
The analyst highlighted escalating competitive dynamics as the primary concern. Cloudflare and Netskope emerged as the most significant competitive challenges. Additionally, traditional firewall providers have demonstrated improved success in cross-selling their proprietary SASE solutions to their existing customer base, creating obstacles for Zscaler’s ability to capture additional market opportunities.
According to the firm’s analysis, the broader platform expansion narrative for Zscaler has failed to materialize as anticipated half a year ago.
Analyst Lowers Revenue Projections
BTIG has adjusted its fiscal 2027 financial model, now forecasting annual recurring revenue of $4.355 billion, representing 16.5% growth compared to the previous year. This revised figure marks a reduction from the firm’s earlier projection of $4.391 billion and falls short of the Street consensus estimate of $4.447 billion.
The security software provider’s shares have declined 39% since the beginning of the year. This performance contrasts with a 24% drop observed across BTIG’s entire coverage portfolio during the identical timeframe. Over a six-month horizon, the stock has surrendered 56% of its value.
Despite BTIG’s more conservative stance, the broader Wall Street analyst community maintains a more optimistic view. The consensus rating for ZS remains at Buy. Target prices among analysts span a wide range from $155 to $335.
Cantor Fitzgerald maintained its Overweight recommendation following Zscaler‘s impressive second-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings report. The cybersecurity firm exceeded projections across multiple metrics including revenue, ARR, earnings per share, and free cash flow generation, while also elevating its full-year outlook across critical performance indicators.
Additional Recent News
Freedom Capital Markets preserved its Buy recommendation while reducing its price objective from $320 to $270, reflecting a broader recalibration of SaaS sector valuations. Wells Fargo launched coverage with an Overweight stance and established a $200 target, emphasizing the company’s platform expansion trajectory and resilient core operations.
The cloud security provider recently disclosed plans to enhance its data sovereignty offerings through an upcoming deployment in Canada. The organization presently operates 160 data centers across the globe.
Evercore analysts noted that Anthropic’s recently launched Claude Mythos model, designed specifically for cybersecurity applications, could create headwinds for cybersecurity sector stocks, with Zscaler among those potentially affected.
As of the latest reporting period, ZS commanded a market capitalization of $22.17 billion. The stock’s average daily trading volume stands at approximately 2.75 million shares. Technical indicators currently signal a Sell rating.
The shares were hovering near their 52-week trough of $128 as of April 9, 2026.
Crypto World
Everything About the Ethereum Price Prediction and Whether $5,000 Is Possible While Pepeto Attracts Whale Capital
The ethereum price prediction just got a major signal. BlackRock dropped $60.8 million on ETH on April 7 according to Watcher Guru, the largest single-day ETH ETF buy in months. That kind of size does not show up unless the smart money sees something the crowd has not priced in.
The ethereum price prediction rides on whether institutions keep buying at this pace. While ETH climbed 6.55% to $2,215 on the ceasefire rally, whale capital chasing faster returns is stacking into Pepeto, where the cofounder who built Pepe to $11 billion runs a presale with live exchange tools and a Binance listing confirmed.
Ethereum Price Prediction Gets a Boost as BlackRock and Central Banks Move In
BlackRock’s ETH ETF bought $60.8 million on April 7 according to Watcher Guru, while central banks including Banque de France, UBS, and Societe Generale started moving parts of the $12.5 trillion repo market onto Ethereum according to CoinMarketCap.
ETH also broke out of the same chart pattern that kicked off a 250% rally in April 2025 according to Blockchain News. The Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled for June 2026, and Standard Chartered raised its ethereum price prediction target to $7,500 for this cycle.
When BlackRock buys $60.8 million in a day and central banks start settling trillions on your chain, the ethereum price prediction stops being a guess and starts being a timeline.
The Ethereum Price Prediction, Pepeto Presale, and What This Bull Run Changes
Pepeto Combines Meme Energy With Exchange Tools No Other Presale Has Built
Beyond the ethereum price prediction, Pepeto is not another meme token riding a trend. It is a presale powered by live exchange products that generate value in any direction, built at a stage where hype and real tools almost never exist together. The cofounder who launched Pepe to $11 billion now runs a project where every product already works.
The bridge connects ETH, BNB, and Solana at zero cost, letting holders on any chain move liquidity without losing a cent. Over $8.84 million raised while the Fear Index sat at 9 shows serious capital entering when the rest of the market could barely move.
The token scanner rates every contract before your wallet touches it, flagging traps that wiped out portfolios in past crashes. PepetoSwap handles every trade with no fees. At $0.0000001863 with the Binance listing approaching, 186% APY staking grows balances daily. SolidProof audited the entire codebase before the first round opened.
Whale wallets that sat quiet through the fear cycle are now increasing their Pepeto holdings round after round. These are the same addresses that loaded early positions in past presales and rode them to listing day. They know a bull run is forming, they know how to pick the entry that prints the hardest, and Pepeto clearly proves the historical pattern that formed every crypto millionaire, is repeating here, and only the investors entering now to be part of it.
Ethereum Forecast: Can ETH Actually Reach $5,000?
ETH trades at $2,215 after bouncing 6.55% on the ceasefire rally, still 54% below its all-time high of $4,953 according to CoinMarketCap.
The ethereum price prediction crowd keeps asking about $5,000, and the honest take is simple. ETH already came within 4% of that number when it hit $4,953 in August 2025. Reaching $5,000 needs a market cap around $600 billion, a level this market has supported before. With BlackRock accumulating, central banks building on the chain, the Glamsterdam upgrade in June, and Standard Chartered targeting $7,500, the road to $5,000 is the base case for most institutional models this cycle.
Near-term, the ethereum price prediction lands between $3,000 and $6,000 depending on ETF inflows and the broader bull run. Support sits at $2,050 and resistance at $2,450. If BlackRock keeps buying at this pace and Glamsterdam ships clean, $5,000 could land before year end.
Conclusion
The ethereum price prediction toward $5,000 looks like a question of timing, not possibility, given institutional flows and upgrades landing this year. Meanwhile, Pepeto offers the kind of presale entry that large caps at $2,215 need cycles to match.
Right now the market is splitting into two groups. One entered Pepeto before the Binance listing and watched live tools plus viral momentum turn early pricing into the biggest gains of the cycle. The other sat on the ethereum price prediction waiting for confirmation and paid listing prices for what the presale sold at a sliver. The Pepeto official website is where whale wallets are investing heavily, and following them is the smartest move before the official launch on Binance.
Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale
FAQs
What makes Pepeto the top entry alongside the ethereum price prediction?
Pepeto ships a live exchange with real trading tools and a confirmed Binance listing. The bull cycle now forming is set to push it toward 100x from presale to listing.
How does the ethereum price prediction compare to what Pepeto offers?
Ethereum targets $5,000 for roughly 2.2x from current levels if institutional buying holds. Pepeto targets 100x from presale to Binance listing at $0.0000001863 with 186% APY compounding daily.
Disclaimer: This is a Press Release provided by a third party who is responsible for the content. Please conduct your own research before taking any action based on the content.
The QSB scheme uses only existing Bitcoin consensus rules, sidestepping the network’s contentious upgrade process.
A researcher at StarkWare has published an open-source scheme for making Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computing attacks using only the network’s existing consensus rules — requiring no softfork, no protocol upgrade, and no community-wide coordination.
The project, called Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), was released on GitHub by Avihu Levy, StarkWare’s chief product officer and a leading Bitcoin researcher at the firm who previously co-authored ColliderScript, a protocol for enabling stateful computation on Bitcoin without consensus changes. Levy also co-authored BIP-360, the quantum-resistant address proposal that was merged into Bitcoin’s official BIP repository in February — a proposal that, unlike QSB, would require a softfork.
“StarkWare has some of the best hackers on the planet,” Eric Wall, co-founder of Taproot Wizards and board member of the Starknet Foundation, wrote on X. “It is beautiful to see when hackers use their powers for good.”
QSB builds on Binohash, a transaction introspection technique developed by BitVM creator Robin Linus of ZeroSync and Stanford University that was demonstrated on Bitcoin mainnet in February.
No Softfork Required
The no-softfork distinction is what sets QSB apart. Most paths to hardening Bitcoin against quantum attacks, including BIP-360 and hash-based signature schemes like SPHINCS+, require protocol-level changes that must navigate Bitcoin’s notoriously slow and contentious governance process.
That governance bottleneck is increasingly seen as the real vulnerability. A Google Quantum AI paper published March 30 concluded that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits — a roughly 20-fold reduction from prior estimates. The paper warned that a sufficiently advanced machine could derive a private key from an exposed public key in about nine minutes, narrowly inside Bitcoin’s 10-minute block window. Google itself has set a 2029 deadline to migrate its own authentication services to post-quantum cryptography.
QSB sidesteps the governance question entirely. The scheme operates within Bitcoin’s tightest legacy script constraints — 201 opcodes and a 10,000-byte script limit — and can be used by anyone willing to pay roughly $75 to $150 in cloud GPU compute and submit their transaction directly to a miner via a service like MARA’s Slipstream.
StarkWare has been at the center of Bitcoin’s quantum-defense efforts. Co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson has argued that Bitcoin must begin responding to the quantum threat now.
How It Works
Standard Bitcoin transactions use a digital signature scheme called ECDSA to prove ownership of funds. A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could reverse-engineer that signature process, deriving private keys from public keys and stealing coins.
QSB swaps out the security model. Instead of relying on the mathematical hardness of elliptic curves — which quantum computers can break — it relies on the hardness of reversing hash functions, which they cannot. The scheme forces a would-be spender to solve a computationally expensive hash puzzle that binds the transaction to a specific set of parameters. Any attempt to alter the transaction invalidates the puzzle solution, requiring the attacker to redo the work from scratch.
The result is roughly 118 bits of security against Shor’s algorithm, compared to effectively zero for standard Bitcoin transactions in a post-quantum world.
Early Stage
The project remains a work in progress. The GPU pinning search — the first of three phases required to construct a quantum-safe transaction — has been successfully tested, finding a valid result after roughly six hours across eight Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. But the digest search and on-chain broadcast have not yet been completed end-to-end.
There are practical constraints as well. The transactions exceed default relay policy limits and must be submitted directly to miners. The locking script must be placed as a bare output because it exceeds P2SH’s 520-byte redeem script limit.
Still, the release demonstrates that a degree of quantum resistance is achievable on Bitcoin today — for anyone willing to bear the cost — without waiting for the community to agree on a softfork.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Ether (ETH) may be on the path to retesting $2,500 if the current rally above $2,150 and the bullish spot and futures market volumes pushing prices higher are sustained.
Ether is also supported by a key macro indicator that places the altcoin in a rare undervaluation zone not seen since 2022. The data points to fading selling pressure and the early stages of an accumulation process for Ether.
ETH price structure strengthens above $2,150
Ether’s daily chart shows bulls leading the charge after a 6.33% rally pushed the price above the $2,150 resistance. ETH now eyes a retest of its March highs near $2,385, with further upside toward the $2,475–$2,635 fair-value gap acting as a price magnet for bulls.
Repeat retests of $2,150 over the past two months suggest weakening resistance, as buyers continue stepping in at higher levels.
Charts show ETH market structure improving and the current volumes being largely spot market driven. On the four-hour chart, ETH maintains higher lows while attempting to break into the $2,250–$2,300 range.
The aggregated spot cumulative volume delta (CVD) has remained elevated in April at 184,500 ETH, reflecting sustained spot demand.
The futures CVD has also trended gradually upward to 4.36 million ETH, suggesting that derivatives traders are beginning to support, rather than lead, the move.
The funding rate remains positive at 0.0052, indicating a long bias, and the open interest near 4.75 million ETH is still range-bound, signaling limited leverage.
Data shows ETH is in a controlled accumulation phase, marginally led by spot demand, though a stronger breakout would likely require an expansion in futures positioning.
Related: Ethereum stablecoin supply hits $180B all-time high: Token Terminal
Macro index shows ETH in a “rare” undervalued zone
Ether may be nearing a macro bottom according to the Capriole Macro Index Oscillator with a reading at -2.42. This puts Ether in a rare undervalued zone historically linked with capitulation and trend reversals.
The indicator tracks investment behavior, cycle positioning, and onchain data, with deeply negative values often signaling seller exhaustion.
Previous signals highlight the metric’s reliability. In June to July 2022, ETH bottomed near $1,000–$1,200 when the indicator fell to -2.2. In October to November 2023, a drop to -1 aligned with ETH’s price breaking out after a drop to $1,500.
In April 2025, another negative reading marked a local bottom near $1,500, setting the stage for a rally above $4,000.
The current setup mirrors prior capitulation phases. ETH has fallen from highs near $4,800 to $2,100, while the oscillator sits near cycle lows.
With ETH now in a rare undervalued zone, the downside risk appears limited relative to the upside potential. However, the confirmation would come with a reclaim of the $2,400–$2,500 level and a move back toward zero for the macro indicator.
Analyst crypto sunmoon noted that the ETH taker buy/sell ratio has been trending upward for four to five months.
Combined with the current drawdown, the structure resembles the setup preceding the April to May 2025 rally, suggesting a similar recovery phase may be forming.
Related: Three reasons why Ether traders expect ETH to hold above $1.8K
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research before making any decisions. Cointelegraph makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information presented, including forward-looking statements, and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.
Curve’s FXSwap pools use frxUSD as the base dollar pairing for cross-currency swaps spanning the Brazilian real, Indonesian rupiah, British pound, Australian dollar, Korean won and USDT.
Polygon Labs, Frax, Curve Finance and DFB Network have launched a suite of foreign exchange liquidity pools on the Polygon blockchain, enabling onchain swaps between fiat-pegged stablecoins using Frax’s frxUSD as the base dollar pairing.
The pools are live on Curve’s Polygon deployment and pair frxUSD against BRZ (Brazilian real), IDRX (Indonesian rupiah), tGBP (British pound), AUDF (Australian dollar), KRWQ (Korean won) and USDT, with additional currency pairs in development. The four partners have also collaborated on an incentive program to bootstrap liquidity across the pools, with gauges live for reward distribution.
$6 Trillion Market
The launch targets the $6.6 trillion-per-day global FX market, which the partners argue has remained expensive and slow due to its concentration among a small number of intermediaries. Onchain FX has been theoretically possible for years, the partners said, but high transaction fees, fragmented dollar-side liquidity and a lack of institutional trust in automated market maker (AMM) infrastructure have prevented commercial-scale adoption.
“When you pair sub-cent transaction fees with a stable dollar base like frxUSD and Curve’s liquidity infrastructure, you get something the traditional FX market has never offered: transparent pricing, instant settlement, and access for any company,” Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said in a blog post.
How the Stack Works
Each layer of the stack handles a different function. Frax’s frxUSD serves as the dollar anchor for every pool. The stablecoin is fully backed by tokenized U.S. Treasuries from institutions including BlackRock, WisdomTree and Superstate, and the protocol forwards underlying Treasury yield as sustainable LP incentives.
Curve provides the exchange layer via its FXSwap pool type, which is optimized for currency-pair trading, offering tighter spreads and lower slippage than general-purpose AMMs.Curve has operated on Polygon since 2021 and remains one of the deepest stablecoin liquidity venues in DeFi.
DFB Network handles market-making and liquidity infrastructure, connecting international stablecoin issuers to the onchain exchange layer. The firm provides automated bots that monitor onchain and offchain FX markets and execute arbitrage to maintain pool health.
Polygon itself functions as the settlement layer. A typical token transfer on the network costs roughly $0.002, according to Polygon Labs, and throughput capacity sits at over 2,600 transactions per second.
Commercial FX
The pools are being pitched as practical infrastructure for cross-border business payments. A company settling transactions between Brazil and the United States, for instance, could swap BRZ to frxUSD at market rates, settle in seconds and pay a fraction of a cent in fees, according to the blog post.
For a company processing $10 million per month, even a 50-basis-point improvement in FX spreads would return $50,000 monthly.
Among the non-USD stablecoins in the initial set, BRZ is described as the longest-lasting Brazilian real stablecoin, IDRX serves a large retail base in Indonesia, tGBP is positioned as the leading British pound-pegged token, and AUDF is backed by one of the largest OTC desks in the Oceania region.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Trading in tokenized versions of traditional assets surged in the first quarter, with perpetual swaps tied to commodities and equities drawing billions in weekly volume and bringing 24/7 activity to a wider range of markets.
Weekly trading volume of such assets jumped to $30.7 billion, or 1.72% of the total crypto derivatives market, by end-March, crypto exchange BitMEX, said in a report published Thursday. That’s up from 0.03% in December, according to the exchange, which invented the tools in 2014.
Commodities powered the rise. Contracts linked to silver, gold and crude oil saw sharp gains as price swings and geopolitical tension fueled demand. Oil trading alone climbed to $6.9 billion in weekly volume after the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran started Feb. 28, prompting a surge in round-the-clock oil trading volumes.
While commodities saw a 65,000% jump in volume during the quarter, there’s context to the figure. Precious metals saw a historic rally at the beginning of the year, with silver topping $100 per ounce for the first time and gold rising nearly 24%, before both gave back nearly all of the gains.
Equities saw a similar breakout. Perpetual swaps tied to stocks grew 908% over the quarter to roughly $4.9 billion in weekly volume, BitMEX found.
At its peak during the February metals rally, total weekly volume across perpetuals tied to traditional investments hit $54.5 billion.
The price of oil started surging at the outbreak of hostilities with Iran, given the country’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows.
Perpetual swaps differ from traditional futures contracts by removing expiry dates. Instead, they use a funding rate, a periodic payment between long and short holders, to keep prices aligned with the underlying assets, allowing the instruments to trade round-the-clock with no expiry.
That permanent access to traditional financial markets is what’s driving the growth of tokenized perpetual swaps, BitMEX noted. The current macroeconomic volatility has served as a catalyst to boost volumes, and exchanges have capitalized by launching TradFi perpetuals.
The AI healthcare pivot inside the OpenAI Foundation became concrete this week as the organization announced it is finalizing more than $100 million in Alzheimer’s research grants this month across six research institutions, making the disease the first major target of what the Foundation has committed to as at least $1 billion in 2026 grantmaking.
Summary
- The grants focus on four research areas: mapping Alzheimer’s disease pathways using AI, designing and lab-testing new drugs with AI assistance, supporting open datasets to predict drug activity and chart disease progression, and establishing new biomarkers for diagnosis and clinical trials, including repurposing existing FDA-approved molecules to reduce the path from discovery to treatment
- Jacob Trefethen, Head of Life Sciences at the OpenAI Foundation, is leading the work; he joins from Coefficient Giving, where he oversaw more than $500 million in grantmaking to science and health; the Foundation’s total grantmaking in 2024 was $7.6 million, making this $100 million round a 13-fold increase in a single month
- The grants are part of the Foundation’s $1 billion 2026 spending commitment, itself the first tranche of a $25 billion long-term philanthropic pledge made possible by OpenAI’s fall 2025 recapitalization, which gave the nonprofit access to capital for the first time since OpenAI incorporated a for-profit subsidiary in 2019
The OpenAI Foundation’s Alzheimer’s page frames the disease plainly: “Alzheimer’s is one of the hardest and most heartbreaking diseases families face — and one of the toughest problems in medicine.”
Wait, that quote contains an em dash. Let me use the quote without the dash:
The OpenAI Foundation’s Alzheimer’s page describes the disease as “one of the hardest and most heartbreaking diseases families face.” The Foundation’s approach is pragmatic rather than speculative. Rather than developing new compounds from scratch, the grants prioritize repurposing existing FDA-approved molecules, a lower-risk strategy that shortens the path from discovery to patient access. Over 100 Alzheimer’s drugs have failed in clinical trials since 2000. The Foundation’s position is that AI’s ability to reason across complex, heterogeneous biological datasets can surface mechanisms and biomarkers that conventional research has repeatedly missed. Grantee institutions include UCSF and the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design.
The UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design has already used AI-driven protein design models to engineer molecules that engage, modify, and degrade targets critical to Alzheimer’s disease progression. The Foundation describes this as the beginning of a collaborative pipeline, with the goal of validating AI-designed molecules in cells, tissues, and animals before advancing to clinical testing. The biomarker focus is equally significant. The recent approval of the first Alzheimer’s blood test created a new tool for assessing a patient’s condition without invasive procedures. The Foundation is funding work to expand that toolkit, making it possible to measure a drug’s effect on disease progression in clinical trials and to identify high-risk patients earlier.
Why This Represents a Structural Shift in OpenAI’s Mission
The scale gap is the most striking number in this announcement. The OpenAI Foundation granted $7.6 million in all of 2024. The Alzheimer’s grants alone exceed that by a factor of 13. The $1 billion 2026 target is 130 times larger than last year’s total. This is the activation of a dormant philanthropic vehicle using capital from the company’s recapitalization. The Foundation’s Executive Director role remains unfilled, meaning Trefethen and the life sciences team are building programs at this scale without a fully constituted leadership team in place.
What the Investment Signals for AI in Science
As crypto.news has reported, the credibility of frontier AI companies’ stated missions, including OpenAI’s, is directly tracked by institutional investors and markets watching the AI infrastructure buildout. As crypto.news has noted, OpenAI’s capital and talent decisions in 2025 and 2026 have had direct market effects on AI-adjacent crypto assets and broader perceptions of the AI sector’s long-term trajectory. The Foundation expects to make further Alzheimer’s grants throughout 2026 and is actively seeking to expand partnerships to additional scientists and research institutions.
Binance has added a prediction markets feature to its Binance Wallet, giving users a way to trade on the likelihood of real-world events without leaving the app.
The rolloaut connects Binance Wallet to Predict.fun, a decentralized platform built on BNB Smart Chain and it isn’t supported in every region in which the exchange operates. The platform was built by a former Binance employee and lets users earn yield while positions remain open.
Prediction markets let users buy shares tied to outcomes such as election results, sports matches or economic data releases and have seen their popularity explode. Prices range from $0.01 to $0.99 and reflect crowd estimates of probability.
Users can now place trades using funds already held in Binance spot or funding accounts. It also removes blockchain transaction fees by covering gas costs, a step that could lower the barrier for retail users.
Binance said the feature runs through a keyless wallet system, which splits control of private keys to reduce single points of failure. Users must create a separate prediction account to access the service.
The company does not operate the markets directly or act as a counterparty, it said. Instead, it provides access to a third-party application.
The move comes following prediction markets’ monthly trading volumes surging 200-fold in the last two years from less than $100 million to more than $20 billion, according to TokenTerminal data.
Prediction markets are currently dominated by Polymarket and Kalshi, which together capture more than 97% of the market and have been growing steadily while gaining institutional backing. Kalshi recently secured $1 billion in funding at an $11 billion valuation, and Polymarket seeing up to $2 billion in commitments from the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.
Data shows Bitcoin (BTC) investors who had held their positions for over seven years took profit last week by selling $271 million in BTC.
A similar wave of “OG whale” selling in January coincided with a more fragile market that lacked buyer demand, triggering a sharp dip in the BTC price. Current onchain data reflects a much stronger market where BTC supply absorption and reduced selling may allow Bitcoin to hold its place in the $70,000-$72,000 range.
OG Whale BTC supply meets strong absorption
Data from Capriole Investments shows that the Bitcoin “OG whale spent value” moved roughly $271 million on Sunday. That marks the largest surge in activity for this cohort since Jan. 10, when a $280 million outflow spike preceded a 13% correction to $78,700 from $90,000 within two weeks.
While the whale movement may raise concerns among investors, this activity historically aligns with measured profit-taking rather than with chaotic selling.
Glassnode suggests a stronger absorption capacity from other holders. Data show that the 30-day net position change for long-term holders remained positive at 88,000 BTC on April 9. This follows a reversal from deeply negative flows of -152,000 BTC recorded in February, easing the prior overhead supply pressure.
The accumulating cohorts also continued to expand their holdings. Cointelegraph reported that the total balance exceeded 4.3 million BTC on Tuesday, rising further to 4.5 million on Thursday.
This indicates a sustained transfer of coins into stronger hands, reducing the impact of selling from older wallets.
Related: Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF trails BlackRock with $30M in first-day inflows
Bitcoin “stress cycle” has not reversed yet, says analyst
CryptoQuant analyst MorenoDV highlighted two key indicators shaping the current BTC positioning. The short-term Sharpe Ratio has dropped to -40, a level historically associated with major accumulation phases in 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2023.
At the same time, the buy-and-sell pressure delta (30) indicates a completed capitulation phase, marked by intense sell pressure below -0.05. The metric is now moving toward neutral territory, signaling that forced selling has eased while demand gradually rebuilds.
Past cycles show that the highest asymmetry emerges once the delta re-enters clear buy-pressure zones. The current readings sit between exhaustion and confirmed demand recovery.
The analyst noted that the macro conditions and liquidity flows continue to shape the pace of this transition, adding,
“For investors with a cycle-aware framework, the data suggests we are closer to the beginning of an opportunity than the end of one.”
Related: Bitcoin price surfs US PCE inflation as trader keeps $80K BTC price target
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research before making any decisions. Cointelegraph makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information presented, including forward-looking statements, and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.
AI agents built on Anthropic’s Claude now have a hosted production infrastructure behind them, as the company launched Claude Managed Agents in public beta on April 8, handling the sandboxing, state management, credential handling, and error recovery that previously took engineering teams three to six months to build before writing a single line of agent logic.
Summary
- Claude Managed Agents is available now on the Claude Platform at $0.08 per runtime hour plus standard Claude model usage costs; an agent running around the clock costs approximately $58 per month in runtime before token costs, and the service runs exclusively on Anthropic’s infrastructure
- Early adopters already in production include Notion, which delegates coding, slides, and spreadsheet tasks to Claude in parallel across dozens of simultaneous sessions; Rakuten, which deployed specialist agents across product, sales, marketing, finance, and HR, each live in under a week; and Asana, whose CTO says the company shipped advanced features “dramatically faster” than prior methods allowed
- Two features are in research preview: the ability for agents to create additional sub-agents for complex tasks, and an automatic prompt quality enhancement that improved structured file generation success rates by up to 10 points in internal testing
Anthropic’s @claudeai account announced the launch on April 8 at 5:14 PM ET, drawing 5.09 million views. The service is built around what Anthropic calls a brain versus hands design philosophy: Claude itself is the reasoning layer, while each session runs in a disposable, isolated Linux container that handles code execution, file manipulation, and tool calls. When the next Claude model ships, the infrastructure does not need to be rebuilt. The brain upgrades and the hands remain the same.
Pricing is usage based. The $0.08 per runtime hour applies to the session; standard Claude token pricing applies to model usage on top of that.
The deployment patterns across Notion, Asana, and Rakuten illustrate three distinct enterprise use cases. Notion integrated Claude directly into workspaces, allowing engineers to ship code and knowledge workers to generate presentations and websites without leaving the platform, running dozens of parallel tasks while teams collaborate on outputs simultaneously. Asana built what they call AI Teammates, agents embedded in project management workflows that pick up assigned tasks, draft deliverables, and hand back outputs for human review. Rakuten stood up agents across five business functions, each plugged into Slack and Teams, accepting task assignments and returning structured deliverables, with each function live in under a week. Sentry took a different path, pairing its existing debugging agent with a Claude-powered counterpart that writes patches and opens pull requests autonomously from a flagged bug to a completed pull request with no human intervention.
What Developers Need to Know Before Building
Developers define the agent by specifying the model, system prompt, tools, MCP server connections, and guardrails, then configure a cloud environment with pre-installed packages and network access rules. Anthropic’s infrastructure handles tool orchestration, context management, checkpointing, and crash recovery. Sessions persist through disconnections, a practical requirement for complex workflows. The one significant constraint is that the service runs only on Anthropic’s infrastructure and is not currently available through Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI, which matters for organizations with multi-cloud strategies.
Why This Launch Matters for the Broader AI Market
As crypto.news has reported, the AI integration driving enterprise decisions in 2026 increasingly determines headcount, and the operational overhead that Claude Managed Agents eliminates has been a significant barrier to adoption for teams without specialist DevOps resources. As crypto.news has noted, the AI infrastructure buildout, of which Anthropic’s agent platform is a direct example, is one of the primary drivers of capital allocation decisions that have ripple effects across crypto-adjacent AI token markets. The multi-agent coordination feature, which allows agents to spawn sub-agents for complex tasks, is in research preview, with early access available through the Claude Platform console.
The Open Network (TON), the independent layer-1 blockchain closely integrated with Telegram, has rolled out Catchain 2.0, dramatically shortening block times to 400 milliseconds. The upgrade is designed to push settlement speeds toward real-time for both payments and trades, while enabling decentralized applications to run with performance closer to traditional apps.
According to TON’s announcement, payment transactions now settle in about one second, and trades settle in near real time. The upgrade strengthens TON’s position as a platform aiming to blend messaging with on-chain functionality, a path already underscored by its ongoing Telegram integration. The update comes alongside an inflationary shift in TON’s token economics: annual inflation is projected to rise six-fold, to roughly 3.6% from about 0.6%, driven by the increased rate of block production.
“More blocks mean more validator rewards, which create stronger staking incentives and bring more TON into the network,” TON stated in its release. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade builds on TON’s Catchain consensus architecture, a BFT-style algorithm first proposed in 2020, and brings near-instant settlement to a network already embedded in an app ecosystem with approximately 1 billion users globally.
Market data captures a snapshot of how the upgrade is being received. TON was trading up about 2.3% to roughly $1.28 on Thursday, with volume around $130 million and a market capitalization near $3.17 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Observers noted a surge in activity on TON’s network following the upgrade, including spikes in transactions per second tracked by TON Explorer, underscoring the immediate demand for faster settlement and more responsive smart-contract activity.
The announcement frames Catchain 2.0 as a natural evolution of TON’s thrust to merge everyday communications with on-chain finance, a vision that has been reinforced by Telegram’s growing crypto toolkit. In February, Telegram added self-custodial vaults to its in-app wallet, enabling users to earn yield on Bitcoin, USDT and ETH. Earlier this month, the wallet extended into perpetual futures trading, launching a new feature set in collaboration with the perpetual DEX Lighter. The integration enables TON-based payments and on-chain interactions directly within Telegram’s user interface, broadening the potential scale of user adoption and on-chain activity.
Key takeaways
- Block time slashed to 400 milliseconds. Catchain 2.0 delivers substantially faster block finality, aiming to improve throughput and responsiveness for both financial transactions and developer applications.
- Settlement accelerates to near real-time. Payments settle in about one second; trades settle in real time, enabling a smoother user experience for rapid on-chain exchanges.
- Inflation expected to rise to 3.6%. The increase from roughly 0.6% reflects higher block production and the ongoing minting/burning dynamics within TON’s ecosystem.
- Stronger staking incentives. More blocks translate into more validator rewards, reinforcing incentives to run validators and participate in securing the network.
Catchain 2.0: what changes and why it matters
At the core of the upgrade is TON’s Catchain consensus algorithm, a mechanism designed to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance while maintaining speed and finality. By accelerating block production, Catchain 2.0 effectively raises throughput across the network, which has several practical implications for users and developers. First, faster blocks reduce the latency between submitting a transaction and its confirmation, a critical factor for payment rails and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that rely on quick settlement to minimize front-running and slippage. Second, the higher block rate inflates the expected rewards for validators, potentially strengthening the security of the network through deeper staking participation and a larger base of committed validators.
The inflationary shift, while potentially dilutive in the short term, is positioned by TON as a byproduct of increased activity and network security. The organization argues that the higher issuance supports a more robust staking economy, which can, in turn, bolster long-run network reliability and validator health as adoption grows. Investors and builders should weigh the inflationary impact against the benefits of faster settlement and a more responsive ecosystem, particularly as TON deepens its ties with Telegram’s user base and integrated financial features.
Telegram: turning messaging into a multi-asset financial channel
The upgrade arrives amid a broader narrative: TON’s alignment with Telegram is not merely cosmetic. The Telegram integration is positioned to enable users to send TON-enabled crypto payments within chats, bridging everyday communication and on-chain activity. The platform’s wallet features have evolved to offer in-app yield opportunities across major assets, including BTC, USDT, and ETH, and the ecosystem already supports perpetual futures trading through Lighter within the Telegram app. This progression points to a broader strategy of embedding crypto functionality into a widely used messaging interface, lowering the friction for mainstream users to engage with digital assets and on-chain commerce.
Pavel Durov, co-founder of Telegram, has highlighted how real-world restrictions and VPN workarounds in certain jurisdictions—such as Iran and Russia—have driven users to seek more resilient, open channels for communication. The TON-Telegram integration exemplifies a complementary model: users can exchange value alongside messages, with the possibility of automated payments and more sophisticated DeFi interactions embedded into the chat experience. For builders, this signals a shift toward app-layer ecosystems where identity, messaging, and asset transfer are increasingly interwoven.
Market response and next steps for TON
From a market perspective, TON’s price and on-chain activity suggest cautious enthusiasm for Catchain 2.0. The token’s modest near-term gain aligns with a broader pattern of traders evaluating how faster settlement and higher block production could influence user uptake, validator participation, and overall network throughput. The surge in on-chain activity reported by TON Explorer after the upgrade offers a tangible signal that developers and users are experimenting with new throughput capabilities and real-time interactions across the TON ecosystem.
Beyond immediate price moves, the key questions for investors and developers center on the durability of the new throughput gains, the sustainability of the higher inflation regime, and the extent to which Telegram’s in-app crypto features catalyze meaningful, recurring usage. Will higher staking rewards translate into deeper validator participation, and how will that impact network security and governance over time? How quickly will the on-chain experiences inside Telegram translate into real-world transaction volumes, merchant integrations, or consumer wallets?
Analysts will also be watching how Catchain 2.0 scales with continued ecosystem support. The near-term trajectory will depend on the balance between attracting new users through Telegram’s reach and maintaining robust validator participation to preserve the benefits of faster finality. In the meantime, developers can start leveraging the improved throughput to experiment with more sophisticated DeFi primitives, cross-chain liquidity, and real-time settlement use cases that were previously limited by latency.
What remains uncertain and what to watch next
While the upgrade delivers clear technical and user-facing benefits, several uncertainties deserve attention. The sustainability of the 3.6% inflation target hinges on adoption rates and the ongoing cycle of block production. The pace at which Telegram-integrated features translate into measurable user engagement and on-chain value remains to be seen, as does how regulatory developments may shape in-app crypto features and wallet services. Market participants will want to monitor validator health, network security metrics, and any changes in staking participation as Catchain 2.0 matures.
In sum, TON’s Catchain 2.0 represents a meaningful step toward faster, more interactive on-chain experiences embedded in a widely used messaging platform. For traders and developers, it signals a broader opportunity: a more responsive, scalable environment for payments, DeFi, and user-centric apps that live at the intersection of daily communication and digital assets. As TON continues to evolve its ecosystem—balancing security, inflation dynamics, and user adoption—the coming quarters will reveal how deeply this integration can redefine mainstream crypto usage.
Readers should watch for updates on validator participation, new application experiments on TON’s mainnet, and any material shifts in on-chain activity as Telegram-enabled features gain traction in real-world usage.
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