MIAMI — Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump and the co-founder of American Bitcoin (ABTC), said that bitcoin BTC$81,281.72 has reached a sharp influx of traditional financial giants, name-checking Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill division, Charles Schwab Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“JPMorgan, who was crapping all over bitcoin 18 months ago, saying it was a joke asset,” Trump said on Wednesday at Consensus Miami 2026. “It’s really interesting — now they’re allowing people to take down home mortgages against their bitcoin holdings at JPMorgan, this happened in a period of 18 months, my friends.”

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had been a longtime critic of cryptocurrencies, though his bank has since been among those embracing blockchain technology and associated advances, including tokenization of assets.

Trump, whose father has pursued aggressive pro-crypto policies from the White House, said the crypto industry has “broken the banks” that had once turned away the Trump family, rejecting their business.

“The financial institutions all realize that they’ve lost and they can no longer push back,” he said. “And so instead of actually fighting against the tide, you know what they’re doing, they’re swimming with it for the first time.”

American Bitcoin, a mining company that is ranked as the 16th largest public holder of bitcoin, is mining bitcoin at 50 cents on the dollar, said Trump, the company’s chief strategy officer. He said the company is trying to establish the cheapest bitcoin acquisition in the sector. And he said bitcoin is “seeing a new torque” in the asset.

“It’s truly become one of the great stores of value ever,” he said, repeating his frequent claim that the asset will eventually top a million dollars.

Some of the world’s largest remittance providers are accelerating their digital asset strategies as they look for faster settlement alternatives to traditional banking rails.

Western Union’s new stablecoin USDPT is the latest example of the growing overlap between traditional payments firms and crypto infrastructure. The money transfer company launched its Solana-based stablecoin on Monday in the Philippines and Bolivia, with plans to expand into additional markets throughout 2026.

Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan said in the company’s Q1 earnings call that the stablecoin will be used as an alternative settlement layer to the decades-old SWIFT network.

Digital assets allow transfers “to begin moving and settling between us and our agents onchain in real time at much faster speeds and again over weekends and holidays where we have capital tied up because the traditional banking system only settles Monday through Friday,” he said.

Western Union’s stablecoin follows the launch of its Digital Asset Network. Source: Western Union

Western Union is not the only remittance provider trying to move cross-border settlement away from the incumbent banking system’s weekday-only rails.

Rival MoneyGram on Tuesday announced a partnership with Kraken that allows users to convert crypto into cash for pickup, adding to a broader push among remittance firms to integrate blockchain-based payment rails.

SWIFT isn’t disappearing anytime soon

From its early years, crypto was often framed as an alternative to centralized financial systems and intermediaries. 

Though Satoshi Nakamoto did not explicitly call for replacing banks in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, the network’s genesis block included the newspaper headline: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

As Bitcoin launched after the collapse of institutions like Lehman Brothers, the message has been interpreted as a political statement against centralized finance and bank bailouts.

Bitcoin’s first block was mined on Jan. 3, 2009, during the Global Financial Crisis. Source: Bitaps

Related: DeFi can freeze stolen funds, but not everyone agrees it should

But today, many of those same financial institutions are embracing blockchain-based settlement systems themselves.

“It is no longer a question of if Western Union will be active in digital assets, it is now how fast can we scale,” McGranahan said.

Western Union exploring alternatives to SWIFT does not mean crypto has replaced the finance messaging network founded in 1973. SWIFT is still deeply embedded in the cross-border settlement infrastructure used by banks in more than 200 countries and territories.

In fact, SWIFT itself has also been experimenting with blockchain-related infrastructure. Last September, the organization announced work on a shared ledger initiative involving more than 30 financial institutions.

“SWIFT isn’t going to be replaced by a single announcement or a single stablecoin,” Bernardo Bilotta, CEO of stablecoin infrastructure platform Stables, told Cointelegraph. 

“It’s deeply entrenched, and for many types of institutional transfers, it works well enough that the switching costs outweigh the benefits of moving to something new.”

Stablecoins unlock “dead” remittance capital

Faster remittance settlement has obvious benefits for end-users, who no longer have to be constrained to business days.

On the backend, it unlocks “dead capital” for the remittance provider and its local partners.

“A company like Western Union has capital parked across hundreds of correspondent banking relationships globally, pre-funding accounts so that when a transfer hits, the money is already sitting there waiting,” Bilotta said.

He added:

It earns nothing, it does nothing except guarantee that a payment can settle two or three days from now on a banking schedule designed in the 1970s.”

Moving settlement onto blockchain-based assets such as stablecoins compresses the payment timeline from days to minutes.

However, Bilotta argued that not all that liquidity will start flowing into useful earnings, as stablecoins also need locked reserves and partake in real-time treasury management. So in practice, not all the “dead capital” unlocked by stablecoins is expected to be immediately deployed elsewhere. 

Stablecoin issuers also keep large amounts of capital locked in reserves. Source: Circle

Related: Why yen stablecoins are key to Japan’s crypto ambitions

Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group, is building the JPYSC stablecoin in Japan. He said that the extra time in traditional rails also creates safeguards and buffers. Institutions batch transactions, net exposure and manage liquidity around banking hours.

“Stablecoins remove that delay. Powerful, but it means treasury systems must now operate continuously, not only during business hours,” Watanabe told Cointelegraph.

Private stablecoins risk creating new silos

While stablecoins promise faster and more efficient settlement, not all blockchain-based payment systems are built equally.

Bilotta argued that private settlement networks such as Western Union’s USDPT offer institutions tighter control over issuance, treasury management and counterparties, but risk recreating the same fragmentation blockchain originally aimed to solve.

“Every company that launches its own stablecoin creates another walled garden that the rest of the ecosystem has to bridge to or ignore,” he said.

Unlike private stablecoins operating inside closed ecosystems, public stablecoins such as Tether’s USDt (USDT) benefit from shared liquidity pools and interoperability across exchanges, wallets and payment platforms.

“A dollar moved through USDT in Thailand is the same dollar that arrives in Australia,” Bilotta said. “No bridging, no translation, no bilateral agreements between private networks.”

Watanabe shared similar concerns, warning that if every major payment company launches its own isolated settlement network, the industry could simply recreate the siloed infrastructure of correspondent banking on blockchain rails.

“Private settlement networks are efficient inside a closed ecosystem,” Watanabe said. “Their weakness is interoperability.”

He argued that the long-term advantage of public blockchain rails is not just faster settlement, but shared infrastructure where liquidity can move more naturally between applications, exchanges and financial systems.

For all the promises of faster settlement and 24/7 payments, blockchain-based remittances still risk rebuilding the same fragmented infrastructure they were meant to replace.

Magazine: North Korea denies crypto hacks, Upbit’s bank tests Ripple: Asia Express

Anthropic just made Elon Musk’s SpaceX a key supplier to its AI ambitions, and the timing is hard to miss.

The Claude maker said Wednesday it had signed a deal to tap all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center, locking in access to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within the month.

The agreement directly expands what Anthropic can serve to Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers, with Claude Opus API rate limits raised significantly and Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits doubled for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, all effective Wednesday.

The Colossus 1 deal is the latest in a growing stack of Anthropic compute partnerships.

The company has previously signed an up to 5 gigawatt agreement with Amazon that includes nearly 1 gigawatt of new capacity by year-end, a 5 gigawatt deal with Google and Broadcom that comes online in 2027, a Microsoft-NVIDIA strategic partnership covering $30 billion of Azure capacity, and a $50 billion U.S. AI infrastructure investment with Fluidstack.

Anthropic also flagged interest in partnering with SpaceX on orbital AI compute capacity, expanding the relationship beyond terrestrial data centers.
The timing matters because SpaceX is weeks away from going public.

The Musk-led firm filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1 for an IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation, with the public S-1 expected by late May and the roadshow set for the week of June 8.

Adding Anthropic as a named compute customer ahead of the listing strengthens SpaceX’s pitch as more than a launch and Starlink business, with AI infrastructure now a disclosed revenue line.

The deal also lands as Anthropic continues international expansion to meet data residency requirements in regulated industries.

On last night’s earnings call for Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), Michael Saylor and CEO Phong Le finally admitted that they’re considering selling the company’s bitcoin (BTC).

This sudden change undoes years of guidance and explicit assurances that Strategy would never sell. 

Specifically, Saylor and Le told analysts on the company’s first-quarter earnings webinar that Strategy will probably sell some BTC to pay a dividend, framing the move as a way to “inoculate” the market as to the company’s new strategy.

Le walked through scenarios in which the company would sell BTC to fund preferred dividends while remaining a “net buyer.” 

Truly, it’s a remarkable reversal of rhetoric.

In January 2022, with BTC down roughly 40%, Bloomberg asked Saylor whether Strategy would ever sell BTC.

“Never. No. We’re not sellers. We’re only acquiring and holding BTC,” Saylor swore to Bloomberg. “That’s our strategy.” 

Bitcoin (BTC) cooled from new 13-week highs at Wednesday’s Wall Street open amid mixed signals over a US-Iran peace deal.

Key points:

• Bitcoin stops short of tapping $83,000 as momentum becomes guided by geopolitical developments.
• Oil sees flash volatility around rumors of the Strait of Hormuz opening.
• Bitcoin trader sees a price reset to a $78,400 trend line.

Iran deal let-down sours Bitcoin’s attack on $83,000

Data from TradingView showed a new local peak for BTC/USD of $82,833 on Bitstamp.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The pair made fresh gains amid reports of a 14-point ceasefire agreement potentially coming into effect — one that would include resumption of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Hours later, however, US President Donald Trump said that Iran’s agreement to the terms of the truce was “perhaps, a big assumption.”

“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before,” he added in a post on Truth Social.

Source: Truth Social

Bitcoin reacted by erasing its upside to circle $81,500 at the time of writing, still up around 1% on the day.

Oil also saw volatility, with WTI dropping over 10% in a matter of hours before rebounding to $96 per barrel.

CFDs on WTI crude oil one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Commenting on X, trading resource The Kobeissi Letter reported what it called “unusually large” short interest on WTI, which totaled nearly $1 billion, immediately before the drop.

Light crude oil futures chart. Source: The Kobeissi Letter/X

BTC price focus switches to $78,000 and higher

Bitcoin traders, meanwhile, looked to patches of potential liquidations on exchange order books for clues as to where price might head next.

Related: Bitcoin can crash to $50K if ‘most critical’ bear market test fails: Analysis

“Above, the $82.4K area still has some left. But price did take out most of the local liquidity from the past day. With price at 3 month highs, we would need to zoom out to see the other major levels,” trader Daan Crypto Trades told X followers. 

“Below, the $80.1K & $78.2K levels are good to watch if price were to trade into them.”

Crypto liquidation history (screenshot). Source: CoinGlass

Data from CoinGlass put total crypto liquidations over the past 24 hours at more than $550 million, with shorts accounting for $400 million of the total.

Trader CrypNuevo called BTC/USD “overextended” on short time frames, seeking a retracement to the 50-period simple moving average (SMA) on the four-hour chart. That stood at $78,432.

“Ideally it continues pushing straight higher without any exhaustion signs and it will overextend price even more so the short will be more atractive and worth it when we see those signs at higher prices,” he wrote on X.

BTC/USD four-hour chart with 50SMA. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Earlier, Cointelegraph reported on concerns that historical precedent called for the failure of Bitcoin’s current breakout attempt.

Key Highlights

• Walt Disney delivered Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue of $25.2 billion, representing a 7% year-over-year increase and surpassing analyst expectations of $24.9 billion
• The company’s adjusted earnings per share reached $1.57, exceeding Wall Street’s consensus forecast of $1.49
• CEO Josh D’Amaro, in his first quarterly report, projected fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS growth of roughly 12%
• Streaming entertainment (SVOD) operating profit jumped 88% compared to the prior year, with margins crossing the 10% threshold for the first time
• Shares of Disney climbed nearly 8% during morning trading hours after the earnings announcement

Shares of Walt Disney (DIS) surged nearly 8% during Wednesday’s morning session after the entertainment giant delivered a better-than-anticipated second-quarter performance for fiscal 2026, marking the debut earnings report under newly appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro.

For the quarter spanning January through March, Disney reported total revenue of $25.2 billion, reflecting a 7% year-over-year improvement. This performance exceeded Wall Street’s projection of $24.78 billion. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.57, comfortably beating the analyst consensus of $1.49.

The Walt Disney Company, DIS

D’Amaro, who assumed the chief executive role from Bob Iger in mid-March, outlined his strategic vision during the earnings conference call. His approach emphasizes creative excellence, streaming business expansion, capitalizing on live sports programming, and sustained capital allocation toward theme parks and cruise operations.

The entertainment behemoth plans to execute stock repurchases totaling at least $8 billion throughout the current fiscal year.

Streaming Business Reaches Key Profitability Threshold

The Entertainment division emerged as a standout performer. Subscription video on demand (SVOD) operating profit reached $582 million, marking an impressive 88% year-over-year surge. This achievement pushed streaming profitability above the 10% margin mark for the first time — a benchmark Disney had initially targeted for the entire fiscal year.

SVOD revenue climbed 13%, fueled by expanding subscriber counts and improved average revenue per user. Advertising income from Disney+ provided additional momentum. Theatrical releases including “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” continued generating strong box-office contributions throughout the quarter.

CFO Hugh Johnston highlighted that streaming operations now produce twice the revenue of Disney’s legacy television business, which he characterized as “getting smaller and smaller every quarter.”

Experiences Division Shows Strength Amid Challenges

The Experiences segment — encompassing theme parks, cruise operations, and merchandise — achieved record-breaking Q2 performance with revenue reaching $9.5 billion and operating income hitting $2.6 billion. The division’s operating profit advanced 5% versus the comparable prior-year period.

Per-capita spending increased at domestic theme park locations, while cruise vessels experienced higher occupancy levels. Nevertheless, Johnston acknowledged headwinds, noting decreased attendance at U.S. parks attributed partially to reduced international tourism and competitive pressure from Universal’s newly launched Epic Universe attraction in Orlando.

D’Amaro characterized current domestic consumer demand as “healthy” while acknowledging the company remains “mindful of the macroeconomic uncertainty consumers are facing.” Johnston mentioned rising gasoline prices as a factor under observation.

The Sports segment represented the weakest performance area. ESPN’s division recorded a 5% decline in operating profit to $652 million, pressured by escalating content licensing fees and increased production expenditures.

Johnston framed ESPN as a comprehensive content platform rather than a conventional broadcasting network — one capable of broad distribution and multi-platform monetization. He indicated the sports business is in earlier phases of its streaming transformation compared to entertainment properties.

Forward-Looking Projections

D’Amaro elevated the fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS growth forecast to approximately 12%, improving upon the previous “double digits” guidance. Third-quarter segment operating income is anticipated to reach $5.3 billion. Management reiterated expectations for double-digit adjusted EPS expansion in fiscal 2027.

Addressing artificial intelligence, D’Amaro described the technology as presenting “meaningful long-term opportunities” for Disney, particularly regarding production workflow optimization, while stressing that human creativity remains the cornerstone of the company’s operations.

Disney shares were trading approximately 7% higher as of Wednesday afternoon.

Swiss crypto bank Amina has added custody and trading support for Canton Coin, becoming the first regulated bank to offer services for the token tied to the Canton Network, an institutional-focused network.

In a Wednesday announcement, Amina said clients will gain regulated access to the Canton Network, a public blockchain designed for capital markets and tokenized finance. The network was developed by Digital Asset and is backed by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Visa, BitGo, Goldman Sachs and Citadel.

The move allows institutional clients to hold and trade Canton Coin through a banking platform regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) rather than relying on a crypto-native exchange or custodian, potentially supporting companies that use Canton for tokenization and settlement.

Source: AMINA Bank

The announcement builds on Amina’s broader push into tokenized finance infrastructure. In March, the Zug, Switzerland bank became the first regulated banking participant on the EU-regulated blockchain securities platform 21X, which operates under the bloc’s DLT pilot regime for tokenized securities markets.

Related: Tennessee Bankers Association names Stablecore as preferred digital asset provider

Canton expands institutional finance footprint

Canton Network is positioning itself as blockchain infrastructure for traditional financial institutions, with a focus on tokenized assets, settlement, collateral management and repo markets. Its Canton Coin token is currently valued at around $0.15, with a total market capitalization of $5.7 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Canton Coin (CC) market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap

In April, BitGo expanded its Canton Coin services beyond custody to include trading and onchain settlement, broadening institutional access to the network’s token and related financial activity.

Meanwhile, S&P Dow Jones Indices recently brought its US Treasury Index benchmark onto the Canton Network, allowing institutions to access fixed-income benchmark data through tokenized infrastructure.

Canton faces competition from several enterprise blockchain networks targeting institutional finance. Among them is R3’s Corda, which was designed for banks and regulated financial markets with an emphasis on privacy and permissioned transactions.

Another competitor, Hyperledger Fabric, has seen broad adoption in enterprise blockchain environments, particularly among financial institutions and large corporations.

Related: Bernstein cites $4T tokenized credit opportunity for Figure Technology stock