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Jeremy “jercos” Sturdivant, the recipient of the historic Bitcoin Pizza Day transaction, has confirmed he spent his 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) on a road trip across the United States after running out of money.

The story resurfaced after Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, reposted a video clip of Sturdivant discussing the exchange. The post spread quickly across crypto social media and drew fresh attention to one of Bitcoin’s most often-cited transactions.

The 10,000 BTC That Funded a Road Trip

On May 22, 2010, Sturdivant received 10,000 BTC from developer Laszlo Hanyecz. The payment covered two Papa John’s pizzas ordered on Sturdivant’s credit card. That transaction is now observed annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day and stands as the first documented commercial use of Bitcoin.

Sturdivant said he never considered the BTC an investment. He treated the coins as functional currency and spent them as their value gradually climbed. He emphasized that Bitcoin was meant to be used, not stored as a speculative asset. When a cross-country road trip left him short on funds, the Bitcoin covered the gap.

Bitcoin reached an all-time high of approximately $126,000 in October 2025. At that price, the original 10,000 BTC would have been worth over $1.26 billion. BTC traded near $77,787 on Pizza Day 2026, still placing the notional value of that stack above $770 million.

Bitcoin Pizza Day Revives an Old Debate

Back stands among Bitcoin’s most prominent advocates. He has been vocal about long-term holding strategies as fiat currencies weaken. Just days before reposting the clip, he urged investors to buy BTC at current price levels. His decision to amplify Sturdivant’s remarks was notable for the contrast it implied.

Sturdivant’s approach was to use the coins as money, not accumulate them. Back’s position represents the opposite view. That divide sits at the center of a Bitcoin in culture debate that has persisted since the network’s earliest transactions. Sturdivant wanted BTC to function as a living currency. Back has argued that people should treat it as a hard monetary asset.

Sturdivant has said he has no regrets. The transaction was worth roughly $41 at the time. How that philosophy holds up depends on where the current Bitcoin price cycle ends up.

The post Bitcoin Pizza Day Recipient Speaks Out: How the 10,000 BTC Was Spent appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Ethereum is trading at $2,120 as the final week of May begins, caught in a tug-of-war with the 100-day MA that encapsulates everything frustrating about this cycle.

Having briefly reclaimed the moving average in late April for the first time since the correction began, ETH surrendered it again during the May breakdown and is now trading just below it.

Yet, the moving average is close enough that a single strong daily close could flip the script, but it has been unable to do so with the momentum currently available.

The next few days will determine whether that reclaim sticks or the key $1.8K demand zone finally becomes the next topic of conversation.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily chart, it is evident that ETH briefly reclaimed the declining 100-day moving average in late April, only to lose it again during the May breakdown. The price is now trading just below it at approximately $2.1K, with the 100-day moving average sitting a short distance overhead and acting as resistance once more rather than support.

The RSI has also recovered from its low last week near 30 to approximately 40, which is a modest bounce with no directional conviction yet.

The dynamic has shifted subtly but meaningfully, as this is no longer a case of the 100-day MA sitting far above as an aspirational target. It is close enough to touch, and the daily closes around $2.1K represent an ongoing battle to reclaim it.

A sustained close above the moving average and the $2.2k level would confirm the reclaim and shift the structure back toward neutral. On the other hand, a close below $2,000 would simultaneously breach the ascending channel’s lower boundary, leaving $1.8k as the only remaining structural support before a full reassessment of the recovery thesis.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart shows the price compressing into an increasingly tight range between the $2k support zone below and the $2.15k area overhead. The RSI is recovering from oversold territory to just above 50, which is enough to stabilize the market without yet generating upside momentum.

The white ascending channel’s lower boundary at $2.08k converges with the lower boundary of the $2.15k resistance zone, making that band the last technical defense before $1.8k.

The first meaningful target above is the $2.25k zone, which is the level that acted as support through most of April and early May before the breakdown.

A 4-hour close back above it would signal that the worst of the selling pressure has passed and open a path toward $2.4k. Until that reclaim happens, the tight range between $2.15k and $2k is likely to continue as the market waits for a catalyst in either direction.

Sentiment Analysis

ETH’s funding rate has been predominantly positive throughout most of the corrective phase, with only brief negative spikes rather than the sustained red dominance.

The notable exception was late April, when funding tilted mostly negative for an extended stretch, which coincided with the period where price stalled repeatedly at $2.4k and eventually broke down.

That negative phase appears to have cleared, as funding has returned to positive and has recently printed some of the higher green readings of the past two to three months. The current reading of +0.005 sits at the upper end of what has been a muted range.

The timing of this shift matters. Funding turning aggressively positive while price is sitting at $2.1k, closer to the multi-month lows than to resistance, suggests that a fresh cohort of longs is building positions at current levels with conviction rather than chasing a breakout.

The current setup is more structurally sound, as longs are accumulating near support rather than at the ceiling. Whether that conviction is rewarded depends entirely on whether the $2k channel floor holds and the 100-day moving average is reclaimed again.

The post Ethereum Price Prediction: ETH Battles 100-Day MA as $2K Support Holds the Key appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Strategy passed on Bitcoin this week, directing capital instead toward repurchasing approximately $1.5 billion of its own convertible bonds below face value.

Executive chairman Michael Saylor described the decision as temporary. He suggested the company’s Bitcoin accumulation engine is already preparing for its next move.

What Are Strategy’s Bonds?

Strategy’s convertible senior notes are corporate debt instruments with no interest rate, set to mature in 2029. Holders can convert them into company shares if Strategy’s stock crosses a defined price threshold. The company raised $3 billion through this structure in November 2024, channeling proceeds almost entirely into Bitcoin (BTC) purchases.

Repurchasing that debt at a discount serves two purposes. It reduces future liabilities and frees up balance sheet flexibility ahead of the next BTC buying round. Strategy paid approximately $1.38 billion in cash to retire $1.5 billion of face-value obligations, locking in a saving of around $120 million. The firm had already posted a Q1 2026 accounting loss of $12.5 billion, driven largely by unrealized Bitcoin write-downs under new accounting rules.

On X, Saylor framed the week’s move as a deliberate pause.

The “BitVac” metaphor describes Strategy’s Bitcoin buying machine. The week’s slowest BTC buy of 2026 had already signaled a near-term deceleration, making a full pause notable but not entirely surprising.

As of May 24, Strategy holds 843,738 BTC worth approximately $64.45 billion at an average purchase price of $75,701 per coin, across 110 transactions since August 2020. The firm’s STRC share program outpaced ETF inflows in BTC accumulation for much of the year.

Peter Schiff has raised MicroStrategy death spiral concerns, arguing the model depends on perpetually rising BTC prices. The gold advocate has also slammed STRC leverage risks as structurally unsound. He may view the bond repurchase as further evidence of financial strain rather than strategic discipline.

Whether the BitVac fires up again next week or further debt management takes priority is the key signal to watch.

The post Michael Saylor Didn’t Buy Bitcoin This Week: Here’s What Strategy Bought Instead appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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The broader crypto market dropped more than 5% this week, yet XRP whales accumulated 71 million tokens, ETF inflows held firm, and ledger activity surged sharply.

Claude analyzed the catalysts, the risks, and the realistic path forward, outlining three scenarios that could define the trajectory of XRP throughout 2026.

Whales and Ledger Activity Defy the Market Slump

XRP accumulation refers to large wallets increasing their holdings during price weakness, signaling long-term conviction rather than panic.

Data shared by analyst Ali Martinez shows whales added 71 million XRP over seven days while the token traded near $1.36, marking one of the most aggressive accumulation phases in recent months.

This pattern matters because it reframes the narrative around the recent sell-off. Stronger hands are expanding exposure while weaker holders exit positions, even though the price has yet to reflect the buying pressure in any meaningful way.

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Whale behavior often precedes major directional moves, and the current setup suggests that institutional confidence remains intact despite negative headlines across the broader crypto market.

XRP Ledger activity also strengthened during the downturn, painting a picture that contradicts the bearish price action.

Account-to-account payments climbed from under one million at the start of the week to 1.22 million by May 22, according to XRPScan data.

The jump reflects genuine network usage rather than speculative trading on centralized exchanges.

ETF inflows added another layer of underlying demand that institutional investors clearly value. SoSoValue data shows XRP spot products attracted over $65 million last week, with another $22,04 million in net daily inflows arriving this week despite broader market weakness.

The consistency of these flows during a correction is particularly noteworthy.

These ETF flows differ fundamentally from ordinary exchange trading. Buyers are accessing XRP through structured vehicles, not leveraged positions or short-term speculation, creating a quieter but more durable layer of underlying support beneath the current price action.

Together, whale accumulation, network usage, and ETF inflows form a three-pillar foundation that could shape the next move once sentiment turns.

Claude Maps 3 Scenarios for XRP in 2026

Claude analyzed the current XRP landscape and identified three distinct trajectories that could happen throughout the rest of 2026.

Each scenario depends on how regulation, institutional flows, and broader market conditions interact during the coming months.

Claude points to Senate approval of the CLARITY Act as the most decisive regulatory catalyst still pending, while Standard Chartered lowered the target from $8 to $2.80 by the end of 2026 under bullish conditions.

Federal Reserve rate cuts could also accelerate institutional rotation into higher-risk digital assets during the second half of the year.

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However, the chatbot also highlights structural obstacles that limit upside potential. Up to 2,6 billion XRP could be released from escrow before year-end, creating fresh selling pressure across the market.

ETF inflows still trail far behind the volumes seen in Bitcoin and Ethereum products, while macroeconomic uncertainty and competition from stablecoins remain persistent risks throughout the cycle.

Claude concludes that the moderate scenario is the most probable outcome. The three scenarios break down as follows:

• Bullish case between $5 and $8, requiring full regulatory alignment and aggressive ETF demand
• Moderate case between $2 and $3.50, the most realistic path according to current data
• Bearish case between $0.75 and $1.50 if catalysts fail and selling pressure dominates

A new all-time high remains possible but only if regulation, institutional flows, and a broader crypto bull cycle converge simultaneously.

Without that alignment, the path forward stays defined by accumulation rather than breakout.

Remember that AI predictions like Claude’s offer useful analytical frameworks but cannot guarantee market outcomes. Always combine them with independent research, personal risk tolerance, and qualified professional financial advice.

The post 3 Key Scenarios for XRP Price To Hit a New All-Time High in 2026, Claude Predicts appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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2026 DeFi losses crossed $1 billion in four months, with April alone draining $634 million across 28+ incidents, the worst month on record.

Drift ($285M) and KelpDAO ($292M) alone accounted for $577 million of April’s losses, and neither was a code exploit. 

DefiLlama’s 2026 hack breakdown tells the same thing. 

The biggest slices are LayerZero bridge exploits (18%), compromised admin keys (16%), spoof tokens (14%), and private key compromises (11%). 

Combined, operational and key-management failures account for the majority of all stolen value this year. Smart contract bugs like re-entrancy and oracle manipulation barely register.

Echo Protocol just became the latest data point. 

On May 18, an attacker broke into the Echo Protocol on Monad and printed 1,000 fake eBTC for themselves. That’s $76.7M on paper. 

The problem is, fake tokens don’t buy you anything unless you can trade them for something real. So they took a small chunk, dropped it into Curvance’s lending app as collateral, and borrowed real Bitcoin against it. 

Then bridged that Bitcoin to Ethereum, swapped it for ETH, and ran it through Tornado Cash. Final take: around $816,000. 

Everyone’s calling it $76.7 million but the real number is $816,000, and why those two numbers are so far apart is the main story here.

This breakdown covers what happened, how, and what it says about DeFi security right now. 

The bottom line: The contract was fine. A stolen admin key and lazy controls did everything else, and that’s how most of 2026’s DeFi losses are happening.

Post Mortem (The Summary) 

• Echo Protocol was not hacked through bad smart contract code. The attacker stole or accessed an admin key.
• That admin key controlled minting rights for Echo’s eBTC token on Monad. One private key was enough to create fake Bitcoin-backed tokens.
• The attacker minted 1,000 fake eBTC, worth about $76.7 million on paper. But those tokens had no real BTC backing.
• They could not cash out the full amount because Monad liquidity was thin. So they used 45 fake eBTC as collateral on Curvance.
• Curvance accepted the fake eBTC as normal collateral and let the attacker borrow real WBTC.
• The attacker escaped with about $816,000 in real value, not $76.7 million.
• Echo later burned the remaining 955 fake eBTC and paused affected functions.
• Monad itself was not hacked. Curvance’s main protocol was not directly hacked either. The failure came from Echo’s admin setup and Curvance trusting newly minted collateral.
• The core lesson: DeFi attackers are now targeting keys, admins, bridges, infrastructure, and team operations more than smart contract bugs.
• Basic protections could have reduced or stopped this: multisig admin control, timelocks, mint caps, rate limits, and collateral checks.
• Echo got lucky. The attacker only failed to drain more because there was not enough liquidity to cash out the fake tokens.

The Players

Here’s the full breakdown of what happened, and how. 

• Echo Protocol

A BTCFi (Bitcoin DeFi) project. Their pitch: take your BTC, get a yield-bearing wrapped version of it that works in DeFi.

Their home base is Aptos, where the token is called aBTC. They hit a peak TVL of $878 million on Aptos in May 2025, currently sitting around $254 million. 

Echo expanded to Monad as part of Monad’s mainnet ecosystem push. On Monad, their wrapped BTC token is called eBTC.

This is critical: aBTC and eBTC are completely separate, non-bridgeable assets. They’re parallel deployments, not connected. The hack hit eBTC on Monad only.

• Monad

A new high-performance parallelized EVM L1. One of the hyped chains of 2025-26. Just out of the mainnet, with lots of protocols deploying fresh.

Echo is one of them. Monad itself was NOT compromised in any way. Co-founder @keoneHD confirmed the network ran normally throughout. It was a protocol-level failure on top of Monad.

• Curvance

A lending protocol deployed on Monad. Functions like Aave but with isolated markets, where each collateral asset lives in its own siloed pool so a compromised asset can’t infect the rest of the lending protocol.

They had listed eBTC as a collateral asset.

• Tornado Cash

Sanctioned ETH mixer. You send ETH in, you get ETH out from a different wallet, and break the on-chain trail. Standard exit tool for hackers.

What Got Exploited

Echo’s eBTC token on Monad is a standard ERC-20 contract that uses OpenZeppelin’s role-based access control system. This is industry standard, used by basically every serious DeFi project. 

Two roles matter in its setup:

• DEFAULT_ADMIN_ROLE: the master role. Can grant or revoke any other role on the contract.
• MINTER_ROLE: can call mint() and create new eBTC tokens.

Normally, only Echo’s team holds these. Minting only happens when real BTC gets locked somewhere, and the team mints the matching eBTC. That’s the entire trust model behind a wrapped token.

Here’s where Echo messed up. 

The DEFAULT_ADMIN_ROLE sat on a single EOA, basically just a normal wallet with one private key behind it. And the wallet had no safety nets. Whoever held that key could mint as much as they wanted, whenever they wanted, with nothing to slow them down.

So the entire $254M+ Echo ecosystem on Monad was, in security terms, sitting behind one private key. That key got stolen. Nobody’s said how yet. Could be phishing, malware on a team laptop, an infra breach, an insider, secrets leaked in a repo, supply chain attack through a dev tool. Echo hasn’t disclosed.

The Attack Step by Step

Date: May 18, 2026, around 5:55 PM ET 

• Step 1: Attackers use the stolen admin key to grant themselves DEFAULT_ADMIN_ROLE on a fresh wallet. They’re now admin too.
• Step 2: From that new admin role, they grant themselves MINTER_ROLE. They can now mint.
• Step 3: They call mint(attacker_wallet, 1000e8). 1,000 eBTC shows up in their wallet. Notional value $76.7M. Real BTC backing: zero. These tokens are completely fake, phantom claims on Bitcoin that don’t exist anywhere.
• Step 4: They revoke the original Echo admin and their own admin role too. Cleanup move so it looks less suspicious on-chain. From the outside, it just looks like a random wallet holding 1,000 eBTC.

At this point, the peg is mathematically broken. There are 1,000 more eBTC tokens than there is BTC backing them.

But the attacker hasn’t actually taken anything yet. Fake tokens are worthless unless you can convert them into real money.

The Cashout Flow

You can’t just dump 1,000 fake eBTC on a DEX. Monad’s DEXs don’t have anywhere close to that liquidity. You’d crash the price to zero before extracting anything, and arbitrageurs would catch it instantly. So the attacker went to a lending market instead.

• Step 5. Deposit 45 eBTC ($3.45M paper value) into Curvance as collateral. Curvance accepts it because, from the contract’s view, eBTC is eBTC. No oracle or check that separates “freshly minted fake eBTC” from “legit BTC-backed eBTC.” That’s the second failure of this hack. Lending markets just accept new collateral at face value without checking where it came from.
• Step 6. Borrow 11.29 WBTC against it, about $868K of real wrapped Bitcoin. WBTC is the major BTC-on-Ethereum token, deep liquidity, fully backed. They now have $868K of real value, secured by $3.45M of fake collateral they’re never coming back for.
• Step 7. Bridge the WBTC to Ethereum. That’s where liquidity lives and where Tornado works.
• Step 8. Swap WBTC to ~384 ETH on Ethereum (~$822K).
• Step 9. Run the 384 ETH through Tornado Cash. Trail breaks. Funds land in fresh wallets that can’t be traced back.

Total real money out: approximately $816,000.

How Echo Responded

Within hours of the hack going public, Echo reclaimed the admin key, burned the 955 eBTC still sitting in the attacker’s wallet (which no longer exists), and paused all cross-chain functionality on Monad. 

They also paused the Aptos bridge and Aptos lending even though Aptos was clean, just to be safe. Pushed a contract upgrade on Monad to restrict the affected operations and said they’d patch their other EVM bridge deployments too.

Curvance paused the eBTC market, confirmed that their own contracts were fine, and noted that their isolated market design prevented the damage from spreading to other lending pools.

Keone from Monad clarified the chain was untouched and pegged the actual loss at around $816K.

The Breakdown

The gap between $76.7 million and $816,000 is the whole story. Curvance was the only viable exit, and its depth capped the borrow at approximately $868,000. 

The other 955 eBTC had nowhere to go until Echo burned it. Monad’s thin liquidity saved Echo from a much bigger loss. On Ethereum, this would’ve been close to $76M out the door.

Why this was an operational hack, not a smart contract hack

The code wasn’t the issue. It worked the way it was supposed to. The real problem was how Echo set things up around the contract:

• The admin role was held by a single wallet instead of a multisig. Stealing a single private key was enough to take over the entire protocol.
• There was no time lock. When the attacker granted themselves admin and then minter rights, those changes went live immediately. No delay, no window for the team to notice and respond.
• The contract had no maximum supply. Minting 1,000 eBTC with zero BTC backing was technically allowed by the rules of the contract itself.
• No rate limit either. The attacker minted the entire 1,000 in a single transaction, rather than being forced to spread it out.
• Curvance accepted the freshly minted eBTC as collateral without checking whether it was legitimately backed. The lending market just saw eBTC tokens in a wallet and treated them the same as real ones.

None of these are obscure or experimental fixes. Multisigs, timelocks, mint caps, and supply checks are stuff serious DeFi protocols have been shipping for years. Echo just didn’t bother with any of them.

May 2026 looks like this

Echo is the 14th hack this month. The year so far:

Approximately $328.6 million lost to bridge hacks in 2026 across 8 incidents. None of these were Solidity bugs. Keys, signers, RPC endpoints, off-chain verifiers, that’s where the money is leaving now. The attackers moved up the stack. A few from this year worth paying attention to:

• Drift (April): Not a technical exploit. UNC4736 (North Korea) spent six months social engineering Drift employees, then drained $285M in 12 minutes. Six months of prep, 12 minutes of execution. That’s a military op, not a hack.
• KelpDAO (17 days later): Same group, completely different vector. They poisoned LayerZero’s RPC infrastructure and forged cross-chain messages for $292M. State-sponsored teams running multiple playbooks in parallel.
• AI is showing up too: Google confirmed the first AI-powered mass exploit on May 11 (AI found a zero-day and wrote bypass code for 2FA). GoPlus reported a 231% MoM jump in Web3 losses partly tied to AI. CrowdStrike puts the average eCrime breakout time at 29 minutes, with the fastest at 27 seconds. The attack side is automating, defense mostly isn’t.
• Resolv Labs (March): Admin key compromise on a stablecoin issuer. Attacker minted 80M unbacked USR, drained $25M, and USR depegged by 80%. Same root cause as Echo, completely different protocol type. The pattern doesn’t care what you’re building.

Ondo Finance put it bluntly in their post-incident analysis: “there is no single class of vulnerability to defend against.” That’s the part most protocols still haven’t internalized.

So when Echo got drained through a stolen admin key, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened during the most hostile threat environment DeFi has ever seen, and the protocol was set up as if it were still 2022.

So what?

DeFi spent the last five years getting good at smart contract security. Audits, bug bounties, formal verification, all of it. 

So the attackers stopped targeting the code and started targeting everything else. Keys, infrastructure, employees, signers. None of that gets audited.

For any wrapped BTC protocol, the only security question that actually matters is who can mint, and how hard is it for someone to take that power from them. 

If the answer is “a multisig with a timelock, a mint cap, and a lending market that checks where new collateral came from,” you have a real protocol. If the answer is “one wallet with one key,” you have $254M sitting there waiting to be taken. Echo was the second kind.

The damage doesn’t stay in one place either. Aave wasn’t hacked in April, but it lost $5.4B in TVL within 48 hours of the KelpDAO exploit anyway. People just panicked and pulled their money out of everything. That’s what happens now. One protocol gets hit and the whole sector gets repriced.

The fixes are not new. They’ve been around for years. Multisig the admin, timelock the changes, cap the supply, check the collateral. It’s just that none of it makes a protocol more competitive on the front end, so nobody ships it until they’re the next headline. 

Echo got off easy because Monad’s liquidity was too thin for the attacker to fully cash out. The next protocol probably won’t have that excuse.

The post Echo Protocol Hack Autopsy: The $76 Million Exploit That Wasn’t Really a Hack appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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