Key Takeaways

• Corporate credit concerns push BOJ toward potential June rate adjustment amid market uncertainty

• Yen carry trade dynamics threaten Bitcoin stability as Japan considers monetary policy shift

• XRP traders monitor Japanese credit market developments ahead of central bank announcement

• Rising energy expenses and sluggish economic expansion challenge BOJ’s rate decision timeline

• Central bank’s inflation projections heighten concerns over cryptocurrency liquidity and yen-based trades

The Bank of Japan’s upcoming policy decision extends beyond simple inflation management, as corporate financing vulnerabilities now dominate central bank considerations. A governmental advisory committee has pushed the monetary authority to evaluate credit market health before implementing any policy adjustments. This recommendation intensifies scrutiny ahead of the June 16 Tokyo policy announcement, particularly as energy sector pressures mount.

Business representatives on the economic and fiscal strategy council delivered their recommendations Monday via Cabinet Office documentation. They requested the BOJ monitor both funding availability and pricing dynamics in financial markets simultaneously. The group emphasized that resource scarcity and escalating costs could strain borrowing requirements for small and medium enterprises throughout the country.

This guidance arrives after last month’s split decision by central bank leadership, which maintained existing policy parameters. The 6-3 voting outcome revealed growing support among policymakers for another rate adjustment. Market-based swap contracts currently indicate a 75% probability of a June increase at the upcoming meeting.

Yen Carry Trade Mechanics Threaten Bitcoin Positions

Cryptocurrency market participants face direct exposure to Japan’s monetary trajectory through yen-denominated carry strategies. Market operators secure low-cost yen financing and redirect capital toward higher-yielding opportunities during stable policy environments. Japanese rate increases can trigger forced liquidations across Bitcoin and alternative digital assets.

The central bank elevated its core inflation projection to 2.8% for the present fiscal period. Simultaneously, officials reduced growth expectations to 0.5%, signaling economic weakness. This contrasting data complicates decision-making before the June gathering.

Bitcoin has profited from extended periods of inexpensive yen financing throughout international markets during accommodative financial conditions. However, any abrupt BOJ policy reversal could dismantle leveraged holdings and deplete market liquidity. Consequently, digital asset traders stand ready to respond swiftly to firmer rate indications from Japanese authorities.

Energy Pressures and Credit Vulnerabilities Impact XRP Outlook

XRP exists within the wider asset universe vulnerable to yen carry trade adjustments. Historical Japanese rate modifications have prompted rapid position reductions across prominent cryptocurrency tokens. XRP may experience downward pressure should traders decrease leverage exposure before the central bank’s determination.

The advisory group connected corporate financial strain to Middle Eastern geopolitical tensions and elevated crude oil valuations. Climbing energy expenditures can damage Japanese corporate profitability and amplify default probabilities, particularly among financially weaker entities. Additionally, Tokyo authorities have broadened subsidized loan program availability for struggling enterprises since April.

The BOJ Financial System Report highlighted vulnerabilities in shadow banking sectors and potential contagion from international conflicts. The IMF emphasized the necessity for transparent policy messaging given Japan‘s substantial sovereign debt burden and elevated debt servicing vulnerability. As a result, cryptocurrency market participants currently evaluate BOJ communications alongside inflation trajectories, energy market developments, corporate financing pressures, and worldwide liquidity dynamics.

Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in Strategy (MSTR).

Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin BTC$81,002.49, announced Monday on X the purchase of 535 bitcoin for roughly $43 million at an average price of about $80,340 per coin

The purchases bring the company’s total holdings to 818,869 BTC, acquired for $61.86 billion at an average cost basis of $75,540. With bitcoin currently trading above $81,000, Strategy’s stash is currently in profit.

Last week’s purchases were funded by $42.9 million raised through sales of the company’s preferred stock, according to a May 11 SEC filing.

This purchase follows Strategy’s first-quarter earnings call, where the company said it was prepared to sell bitcoin to repay convertible debt or fund dividend obligations, provided the move remains accretive on a bitcoin-per-share basis.

MSTR shares rose more than 1% in pre-market trading.

Two Trump-branded ventures aimed at retail buyers are both in difficult positions months after their debuts, though for different reasons.

Roughly 600,000 buyers have paid $100 deposits for the gold-colored Trump Mobile T1 phone since its initial announcement, putting around $60 million into a venture that has not delivered a single confirmed device as of May 2026, per Moneywise.

Deposits were paid to Trump Mobile’s registered company T1 Mobile LLC, which uses a limited liability agreement from DTTM Operations, LLC – the company that manages intellectual property, trademarks, and likeness on merchandise associated to U.S. president Donald Trump.

Promised delivery dates have slipped from late summer 2025 to November, then to December, and finally to first-quarter 2026, before being removed from the website entirely.

According to IBTimes reporting, the company updated its terms of service in April to clarify that deposits represent a “conditional opportunity” to buy the device if the company chooses to sell it, removing any binding contract. (CoinDesk has not independently reviewed the previous version of the terms.)

Trump Mobile did not respond to a request for comment send by email as of publication time.

The TRUMP memecoin, a separately structured venture, has had its own difficult run. The token launched in January 2025 at $1.21, zoomed to $73 within 48 hours as retail speculators piled in around the inauguration, and has spent the 16 months since grinding lower.

TRUMP traded at $2.45 on Monday, down roughly 97% from its peak and 82% on the year, CoinGecko data show. Chainalysis estimated retail investors in TRUMP have collectively lost roughly $2 billion since its introduction.

TRUMP launched with 80% of supply held by Trump-affiliated entities CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight, with those tokens scheduled to unlock at approximately $500,000 worth per day (at current prices) through mid-2028. The schedule was disclosed as part of the token’s launch terms, but has produced sustained sell-side supply during a period of declining buyer interest.

TRUMP’s daily DEX trading volume has dropped from a January 20, 2025 peak of nearly $7 billion across roughly 400,000 traders to about $16 million across just 4,200 traders on May 5, 2026, per Dune Analytics data tracked by user @seoul.

That is a 99% drop in both daily turnover and unique daily participants. Average trade size has fallen from around $2,700 to $260 over the same period, suggesting the remaining buyers are smaller retail accounts rather than the larger speculators who drove the original launch.

The share of TRUMP holders with more than $1,000 in the token has collapsed from roughly 19% at launch to about 2% today, meaning almost every remaining wallet now holds less than $1,000 worth of TRUMP. The token has effectively settled into a long tail of small bag-holders with no large position holders left to drive meaningful price action.

For TRUMP holders, the onchain math suggests that a return to launch-era valuations is becoming increasingly unlikely. At current prices, the remaining insider token unlocks represent more than $2.5 billion in potential supply overhang.

Absorbing that supply would require a demand event larger than anything the token has seen since launch, with the token down 13.6% over the past 30 days and roughly 0.1% on the day.

A dinner hosted by Trump for the top 220 token holders at his Virginia golf club in May 2025 produced a rally that faded within weeks. Tron founder Justin Sun pledged $100 million in TRUMP purchases ahead of the July 2025 unlock, with the token continuing to drift lower in the months that followed.

A separate Mar-a-Lago Crypto & Business Conference on April 25, 2026, limited to the top 297 TRUMP token holders with VIP access for the top 29, drew a letter from Senators Warren, Adam Schiff (Democrat, California), and Richard Blumenthal (Democrat, Connecticut) requesting documents about the President’s role in promoting the event.

While Trump tokens and the mobile ventures have different structures and mechanisms, they debuted on the back of front-loaded political enthusiasm, and have struggled in the months since to translate that initial momentum into either delivered product or sustained price support.

Ripple’s prime-brokerage unit has secured up to $200 million in financing from Neuberger Berman to expand margin services for institutional investors. 

The facility was arranged through Neuberger Berman’s specialty finance group, according to Bloomberg.

The funding is designed to support trading across traditional and digital markets. Ripple Prime can draw on the facility based on client borrowing demand across equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, and crypto assets.

Meanwhile, Prime brokers provide financing, custody, clearing, and trading support to large clients. In this case, Ripple Prime plans to use the debt facility to increase the margin it can offer investors trading across multiple asset classes.

Ripple Prime President Noel Kimmel said, “The future of prime finance is supporting all major asset classes through a single structure and credit line.” That remains Ripple Prime’s position, while the actual use of the facility will depend on client demand and market conditions.

Hidden Road deal set up Ripple Prime

The move follows Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road, which closed in October 2025. After the deal closed, Ripple renamed the multi-asset prime brokerage business Ripple Prime.

That transaction gave Ripple a larger role in institutional trading. Hidden Road already served clients across digital assets, foreign exchange, derivatives, and fixed income before becoming part of Ripple’s wider finance stack.

Moreover, Ripple has also moved Ripple Prime deeper into U.S. digital asset trading. In November 2025, the company launched digital asset spot prime brokerage for U.S. institutional clients, including over-the-counter spot access for XRP and RLUSD.

The institutional push continued in April, when Ripple Prime connected clients to Bullish’s regulated Bitcoin options market. That deal gave clients direct access to a crypto-settled BTC options venue while Ripple and OKX also worked to expand RLUSD access in compliant markets.

Credit line adds to Wall Street strategy

The Neuberger Berman facility gives Ripple Prime more capacity at a time when crypto firms are trying to serve institutional investors with products that resemble traditional finance. The structure also links credit, margin, and multi-asset trading under one brokerage platform.

Ripple’s wider expansion has included custody, treasury, stablecoin, and wallet infrastructure. In November 2025, the company acquired Palisade, adding another institutional custody and wallet business to a year of dealmaking.

Strategy CEO Phong Le believes there is more to the company than the Bitcoin (BTC) on its balance sheet. Le stressed that the company’s enterprise business model remains a key part of operations after it posted its strongest financial quarter in a decade.

Enterprise Software Remains a Core Part

Le believes that its enterprise software business remains a crucial part of the company’s long-term plans. The software business serves over 3,000 customers and 500,000 active users, along with Fortune 500 companies, leading banks, healthcare companies, retailers, and government agencies.

According to Le, the software side of Strategy’s business, comprising engineers, enterprise customers, cloud teams, compliance systems, and global operations, gives the company an edge over other digital asset firms. However, Le’s arguments can only hold if the software side of Strategy’s business continues growing while competing with its Bitcoin strategy for investor attention.

Record Financial Quarter

Le highlighted Strategy’s stellar Q1 2026 performance to back his argument. The Bitcoin treasury company reported $124.3 million in total Q1 2026 revenue, up 12% from $111.1 million a year earlier. Strategy also reported $83.4 million in gross profit with a 67.1% gross margin. Le stated that Q1 2026 was the company’s strongest quarter in over a decade, supported by a 12% revenue growth and a 59% growth in cloud revenue. Controllable margin increased by 27%, helping Strategy fund its Bitcoin operations.

Bitcoin Strategy Under Scrutiny

Strategy’s Bitcoin strategy has come under intense scrutiny in recent months as debt and losses mount. The company reported a $12.54 billion net loss, significantly higher than the $4.22 billion loss in the same period last year. Strategy raised over $25 billion in 2025 to fund its Bitcoin operations. Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor recently said during an earnings call that the company could strategically sell some of its Bitcoin holdings to fund dividend obligations. Saylor’s comments have worried investors about the impact of such a move on the asset’s price.

Le sought to calm market jitters, clarifying that the company will sell BTC only in specific cases, adding that it will sell a small portion of its holdings to pay dividends on its Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock (STRC) and to offset taxes. The STRC pays 11.5% dividend to holders. Strategy currently holds 818,334 BTC, valued at around $66 billion.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

This is an excerpt from CoinDesk newsletter ‘Daybook.’ Sign up here, if you haven’t already.

Institutional demand for crypto is real, and suggests there may be a sustained bitcoin BTC$81,101.08 price move above its pivotal 200-day simple moving average (SMA).

Investors poured $858 million into crypto funds issued by asset managers like BlackRock and 21Shares last week, extending a five-week inflow streak and marking the strongest weekly total since late April, according to CoinShares.

More importantly, bitcoin funds alone pulled in over $700 million, taking year-to-date flows to $4.9 billion. Talk about the demand for the leading cryptocurrency. The catalyst? Improving sentiment around the Clarity Act, according to CoinShares’ head of research, James Butterfill.

Bitcoin recently traded at $81,000, having narrowly missed the 200-day SMA positioned above $82,000 late Sunday. That’s the second such near miss since last week. Prices remain above $80,000, indicating that bulls are simply taking a breather, not retreating.

Analysts say the next big leg higher could unfold once prices top $82,000, effectively rising above the 200-day SMA, which is largely seen as a barometer of long-term trends.

“The clean next step is a daily close above $82,000 with steady spot demand. Without that, it can chop between $79,000 and $82,000 while macro sets the tone,” analysts at Marex said.

On the downside, immediate support is seen around $80,400, and the broader demand zone remains between $78,200 and $78,600., according to Vikram Subburaj, CEO of India-based Giottus.com, said in an email.

In the broader market, Sui blockchain’s SUI has surged 12% to $1.26 in 24 hours. The rally comes as developers behind the blockchain look to foray into privacy. Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer of Mysten Labs, the development team behind Sui, posted on X that confidential transactions on Sui will be introduced this year, enabling fee-free privacy-preserving payments at scale.

Last week, Nasdaq-listed Sui Group Holdings (SUIG) said that it had staked most of the $108.7 million worth of SUI tokens in its treasury, removing roughly 2.7% of supply from the active market. That likely greased the bullish momentum.

The other major gainer is XDC Network’s XDC token, which climbed over 10%. Several other tokens, such as KAS, HASH and ATOM , have gained 5% or more in 24 hours.

In traditional markets, U.S. Treasury yields rose as dimming hopes of U.S.-Iran peace deal kept oil prices elevated. Stay alert!

Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”

What’s trending

Today’s signal

The chart shows ether’s (ETH) daily price swings in candlestick format since late 2025. Overlaid are Bollinger Bands, which are volatility bands placed two standard deviations around the 20-day moving average of the price.

The gap between upper and lower bands is currently the narrowest since late 2023. In other words, at their tightest in 2.5 years, signaling an extended period of compressed volatility.

Such tightening typically reflects a market in equilibrium, with both buyers and sellers unwilling to lead the price action. Such low-volatility phases tend not to persist for long, often resolving into sharper directional moves once bulls or bears reassert dominance.

In short: Watch out for a large directional move ahead.

Crypto traders paid annualized fees of 8,700% to service a leveraged, synthetic bet on the valuation of Anthropic. 

Even as the privately-held AI giant neared a $1 trillion valuation, some paid 1% per hour, imputing an expected Anthropic rally to $88 trillion within a year, just to cover the cost of their leveraged long.

For context, the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world today, Nvidia, has a market capitalization of $5.2 trillion.

Worse, the market they selected doesn’t actually deliver real Anthropic shares.

A combination of arcane terminology and abbreviations, off-page terms of service, a small open interest cap, and a simplified interface for trading compressed those disturbing realities into an easy-to-click “Buy” button alongside a flickering price chart.

Normally, short-sellers pay their brokers for the privilege of loaning out shares to sell first, with the hopes of buying back cheaper later.

In the topsy-turvy world of crypto, buying long exposure to Anthropic was even more expensive than shorting over the weekend.

Paying 8,700% annualized fees to bet on Anthropic

Because Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, crypto exchange Hyperliquid lists a USDH-denominated contract using the Ventuals deployer on $7.5 million worth of Anthropic open interest partially based on Notice’s estimate of Anthropic’s valuation.

If you didn’t understand the above sentence, you haven’t read the full terms of service for ANTHROPIC on Hyperliquid and are probably no different than many traders who bought it anyway.

USDH calls itself a stablecoin, even though it’s traded between $0.72 and $1.11 over the past year.

In addition, Notice doesn’t actually know the real-time value of Anthropic.

Moreover, the whole artifice relies on two proprietary altcoins plus innumerable service provider risks.

Despite these stratospheric risks, traders paid up to 1% per hour to use 3x leverage on Anthropic’s private valuation. 

For most of the past two days, the contract traded well above the Notice oracle’s reference price, forcing longs to pay hourly funding rates to shorts. Those payouts briefly made shorting one of the most-hyped AI companies a de facto, high-yield income strategy.

Don’t worry, funding is capped at 4% per hour

Incredibly, Hyperliquid settles funding rates hourly and caps them not at 1% but at 4% per hour.

On Hyperliquid’s ANTHROPIC, the hourly rate exceeded 1.5% over the weekend, equivalent to annualized fees in the five-digit percentages.

Across a 48-hour period this weekend, longs paid shorts over 15% of their position size in funding alone. That isn’t a typo. A $10,000 long with no Anthropic valuation movement at all would have bled $1,500 to the short side within two days.

Disclosures explaining these losses exist on off-webpage disclosures. In essence, the gap between the contract’s mark price and Notice’s oracle reference drives the funding rates on Ventuals contracts on Hyperliquid.

On the ANTHROPIC Ventuals contract, Notice’s oracle sat near $934 while Hyperliquid Ventuals traders paid over $1,060.

Each unit on Ventuals represents $1 billion of valuation, so those numbers translate to a $934 billion oracle-implied valuation relative to a $1.06 trillion Hyperliquid exponential moving average or “mark” valuation.

That 13.6% premium of mark over oracle, which varied by the hour, is what generated the lavish payouts to anyone willing to short Anthropic.