As the chart shows, the Nasdaq 100 (US Tech 100 Mini on FXOpen) is down more than 6% from its recent highs, with Friday, 6 June, standing out as the defining session: a single-day loss of approximately 4.74% marked the worst daily performance of 2026.

The S&P 500 (US SPX 500 Mini on FXOpen) declined around 4% from its highs, while the Dow Jones (Wall Street 30 Mini on FXOpen) posted a more contained loss of approximately 3%. Investors and traders are now asking the same question: Is this the beginning of a deeper correction, or simply an isolated bout of volatility?

Why Did US Markets Sell Off?

The sell-off was driven by a combination of geopolitical, macroeconomic, and technical factors. On the geopolitical front, US/Israel–Iran negotiations have shown signs of escalation in recent days, injecting uncertainty into already fragile risk sentiment.

The primary catalyst, however, was Friday’s Non-Farm Payrolls report, which showed 172,000 jobs added compared with forecasts of just 85,000. The stronger-than-expected reading sent the US dollar sharply higher, putting pressure on all inversely correlated assets, including equity indices, gold, silver, forex pairs, and cryptocurrencies.

Adding further headwinds, Wednesday’s CPI print showed inflation holding at 4.2% (Core CPI: 2.9%), potentially pushing the Fed, now under new Chair Warsh, to keep rates on hold for longer.

Technical Analysis of the Nasdaq 100

The chart presents two contrasting scenarios.

On the bullish side, the price defended the 28,200–28,300 support zone twice, triggering a rebound toward the 28,800–29,000 region, a key former support level now acting as resistance. A clean break above this level could suggest the broader uptrend remains intact, while a rejection might initiate a sequence of lower highs and lower lows.

On the bearish side, a confirmed break below the lows of 9 and 11 June could potentially expose the 25,800–26,000 zone — where a key former resistance and the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement of the late-March rally converge. An RSI divergence on the 4H time-frame, already visible before the sell-off, appears to be playing out in support of this scenario.

With dollar strength, sticky inflation, and geopolitical risk all weighing on sentiment, these levels could prove decisive in the sessions ahead.

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The May read on inflation cooled expectations for rapid monetary easing, as the U.S. consumer price index rose 4.2% year over year. The print reinforced a data-dependent stance from the Federal Reserve and tempered hopes for near-term rate cuts, even as some analysts still anticipate further rate hikes later in the year. The result added headwinds for risk assets, including Bitcoin and gold, while crude oil extended a rebound that has persisted through the year.

Bitcoin has endured a rough start to the year, sliding about 36% since January. Gold has fared no better, retreating roughly 23% from its January peak. In contrast, crude benchmarks have surged, with oil up more than 50% over the same span. The broad inflation backdrop thus remains a litmus test for capital allocation across risk assets and hedges alike.

“Today’s in-line CPI print keeps the Fed cautious, data-dependent, and in no rush to cut,” said Iggy Ioppe, chief investment officer at Theo, reflecting a common view among market participants that policymakers will await clearer signs of easing before altering the policy path. “For Bitcoin, an in-line print is unlikely to be a clean catalyst either way. It keeps liquidity expectations capped and risk assets trading more on positioning than on a fresh dovish impulse.”

Regarding gold, Ioppe noted that real yields remain a central driver. “Without imminent rate cuts, the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset stays elevated,” he said, underscoring why the precious metal has struggled as inflation data points oscillate between hot and not-so-hot readings.

Key takeaways

• The May CPI rose 4.2% year over year, reinforcing a data-dependent Fed stance and delaying expectations for near-term rate reductions.
• Bitcoin has fallen about 36% since January, while gold has declined roughly 23% from its January peak; oil has gained more than 50% in the same period, highlighting divergent macro reactions across assets.
• Institutional appetite for Bitcoin remains cautious. Markus Thielen of 10x Research says the macro setup isn’t yet supportive enough to trigger meaningful reallocations into Bitcoin by Wall Street players.
• Geopolitical and supply concerns—particularly around oil—add an extra layer of uncertainty that could influence inflation expectations and asset mix in the months ahead.
• Market odds on near-term rate moves reflect a wait-and-see approach: CME’s FedWatch tool pointed to a high likelihood—about 98%—of no change at the Fed’s upcoming meeting, underscoring how the inflation path governs risk appetite.

Policy backdrop and the road ahead

On the policy front, inflation dynamics continue to dictate the Federal Reserve’s posture. The latest CPI data align with a narrative of persistent price pressures that require careful monitoring before policymakers consider easing financial conditions. The debate among investors centers on whether inflation will meaningfully slow soon enough to justify rate cuts this year, or whether the data remains too fractious to permit a shift toward looser policy.

As traders parse these signals, the market environment remains fragile. The lack of a decisive shift in policy expectations suggests liquidity conditions may stay constrained for now, especially for assets that do not deliver yields. Tim Sun, a senior researcher at HashKey Group, captured the sentiment: “Only when inflation drops, rate cuts become viable, and liquidity improves alongside lower capital costs, will the overall risk appetite truly reverse.”

In practical terms, this macro tension translates into ongoing caution for digital-asset portfolios. Bitcoin, often viewed as a risk-on proxy in liquidity cycles, is susceptible to declines when macro catalysts loom large or when institutional demand remains tepid. The same backdrop has weighed on gold, despite its traditional role as a hedge, as real yields and the relative attractiveness of yield-bearing assets compete for capital.

Institutional stance and geopolitical risk

In the corporate and financial services sphere, the appetite for Bitcoin appears muted for the moment. Markus Thielen of 10x Research argued that the data released so far do not present a compelling case for a broad reallocation into Bitcoin by big investors. “We do not believe this data is sufficiently encouraging to prompt Wall Street investors to meaningfully reallocate into Bitcoin,” Thielen told Cointelegraph. He highlighted two key frictions: inflation’s persistence as a drag on risk sentiment, and geopolitical tensions—specifically Iran-related developments—that could compound supply-side volatility in oil markets and feed inflation expectations.

Thielen also warned that oil-supply disruptions could become more pronounced during the summer, potentially uplifting inflation expectations and complicating any near-term shift toward higher risk-taking in crypto and other speculative assets. In such an environment, the case for Bitcoin as a hedge or asymmetric bet remains nuanced, with outcomes highly dependent on the trajectory of inflation and the pace of liquidity normalization.

On the rate-front, the market is already looking past the immediate horizon. HashKey’s Sun emphasized that while rate hike expectations were heating up, the probability of a policy move this year remains relatively low unless inflation convincingly converges toward the Fed’s target. The market’s current pricing—reflected in Fed futures—suggests traders see little chance of an immediate policy shift, reinforcing a wait-and-see stance for both traditional and crypto markets.

What to watch next

Looking ahead, two threads are particularly consequential for markets and crypto builders alike. First, the inflation path remains the arbiter of policy and liquidity: sustained deceleration would tilt the balance toward rate cuts and a broader risk-on rally. Second, geopolitical tensions and commodity-market dynamics could reintroduce volatility by injecting uncertainty into inflation expectations and the pace of capital cost reductions.

Investors and developers should monitor upcoming inflation releases and any shifts in the Fed’s communications. Attention will also turn to global oil supply news and potential geopolitical flare-ups, which can ripple across equities, bonds, and crypto markets alike. As the data flush continues, the balance between inflation normalization and policy accommodation will likely shape how Bitcoin, gold, and other risk assets perform in the near term.

For a clearer read on the inflation trajectory, traders often turn to data trackers such as Trading Economics, which notes the CPI’s movement as part of a broader inflation picture, and to policy trackers like the Fed Funds futures market. CME’s FedWatch tool remains a widely cited barometer of policy expectations, currently signaling a minimal near-term likelihood of rate changes absent a sharper shift in inflation trends.

An artificial intelligence and cybersecurity researcher claims to have jailbroken Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude Fable 5, within just 48 hours of it being launched. 

“Pliny the Liberator,” a well-known figure in the AI community, said on Wednesday he “liberated” Fable 5, launched on Tuesday as a safety-tuned version of the more powerful Mythos model that Anthropic said was too dangerous to release widely.

He used various techniques, including a jailbroken version of Opus 4.8, to bypass the built-in safeguards that Anthropic installed on the model to prevent users from asking it for potentially harmful information, such as drug-making formulas or hacking instructions. 

“Despite this overly sensitive, authoritarian ‘safety’ layer on top of Mythos, my lil liberators have been hard at work […] cleverly finding the holes in the fence that the thought police missed,” said Pliny. 

Some crypto users had already expressed concern during the launches of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos earlier this year that it could be used to attack crypto protocols and software. A jailbroken version of Claude Fable 5 would mean the threat is even closer than expected.  

Getting around Claude Fable 5’s guardrails 

“Pliny” rose to prominence around 2024 by developing and openly sharing jailbreak prompts for models like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and others, often posting “jailbreak alerts” with techniques that bypass guardrails shortly after new AI models launch.

To get around Anthropic’s security fence, Pliny said he used Unicode and homoglyphs, long-context framing, narrative and fiction framing, academic-style decomposition-recomposition, and a jailbroken Claude Opus 4.8 to get Fable to respond to his otherwise restricted prompts. 

“Perhaps the most effective is decomposition + recomposition in the backend,” he said.

This involves breaking requests into small, innocent pieces and asking for harmless-sounding facts one by one. Each prompt alone looked fine to the AI’s safety filters, but when pieced back together, they produce something more useful or dangerous. 

Pliny demonstrates a path to meth synthesis by asking about the Birch reduction method. Source: Pliny

Backlash over Fable 5 mounts

Anthropic’s Fable 5 has prompted backlash from critics since its launch due to its heavy restrictions.

When a user prompts the model for sensitive topics such as bioweapons or cybersecurity, Fable 5 is designed to return a notification and then redirect the conversation to an earlier, less capable model.

Related: AI agents with crypto could escape and become ‘unstoppable,’ experts warn

“This is one of the first times that an AI company has rolled out a guardrail, and there has been uniform disdain. It has led to a lot of justified anger,” said Sayash Kapoor, an AI researcher at Princeton University, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The consensus seems to be that this has been one of the most disappointing model drops of all time, effectively preventing legitimate researchers from contributing their talents to our collective advancement,” said Pliny. 

Anthropic had found no universal jailbreaks

During the Fable 5 launch, Anthropic said it ran an external bug bounty program to look for ways to jailbreak the AI model. 

“As well as internal testing, we ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing.”

Cointelegraph reached out to Anthropic for comments but did not receive an immediate response. 

Magazine: AI-driven hacks could kill DeFi — unless projects act now 

Crypto-friendly DBS Bank said it will start offering tokenized gold trading to its retail customers in the second half of 2026.

DBS said it will list the product, called DBS Physical Gold Tokens, on its digibank platform and is also considering making it available on the DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), which is tailored for accredited investors and institutions.

The bank will tokenize, issue, distribute and manage the physical gold tokens entirely in-house, backed by trusted bank-grade infrastructure. Each token is backed by 1 gram of physical gold held by DBS in a dedicated vault in Singapore, the bank said in a statement.

The move builds on a growing trend towards blockchain-based versions of real world assets (RWAs). The size of physical gold holdings in the portfolios of wealthy clients of DBS has more than doubled over the past three years.

In 2025, DBS tokenized structured notes on Ethereum and listed sgBENJI, the token of Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, alongside the Ripple’s RLUSD dollar-pegged stablecoin.

“While our retail investors have been able to buy gold funds, access to physical gold has been largely available to only institutional and accredited investors,” said James Tan, the head of DBS’ investment product and advisory unit. “DBS has offered physical gold investments to wealth clients since 2013, and we are now leveraging tokenisation to broaden access, enabling more retail customers to invest in gold in a safe and meaningful way.”

Advisers to some of the world’s largest financial institutions are showing renewed interest in stablecoins and the tokenization of assets, rather than a continued zeal for Bitcoin itself. Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise, summarized the sentiment in a memo after speaking with more than 40 advisers who remain broadly interested in crypto but are increasingly focused on real-world crypto applications.

In the memo, Hougan quoted advisers who were “still interested in crypto” but “more interested today in stablecoins and tokenization than they are in Bitcoin.” He noted that several calls this week highlighted curiosity about how crypto technologies are being applied in areas ranging from capital markets to cross-border payments, beyond price momentum or BTC narratives alone.

Bitcoin has faced a softer run of momentum, trading down roughly 30% year-to-date and hovering around the $62,500 level, a backdrop that may be amplifying the search for practical crypto use cases among institutional clients. Against this backdrop, stablecoins and tokenization have emerged as focal points for Wall Street, signaling a potential reorientation of crypto capital toward infrastructure, compliance-friendly products, and traditional investment channels.

The scene outside the traditional spot market is shifting as well. Circle, the issuer of the USD Coin (USDC), staged a high-profile initial public offering in June 2025, with its stock climbing to a peak near $240 from an initial debut around $31. Since then, the shares have cooled, closing just under $79 on the most recent session observed. The move underscored investor appetite for crypto-related equities, even as broader crypto equities have encountered a broader rout.

Beyond equity markets, regulatory signals appear to be aligning with broader adoption of tokenized assets. Reports indicate that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is considering allowing tokenized stock trading, a development that could give traditional investors greater access to select equity exposure via blockchain-backed instruments. The prospect of a formal framework for tokenized securities may bolster confidence among institutional buyers contemplating crypto-enabled strategies.

Hougan underscored that the narrative around crypto—from CNBC headlines to speeches by senior policymakers and executives at large asset managers—now frequently centers on stablecoins and tokenization rather than Bitcoin’s live price moves. “It’s hard to turn on CNBC and not hear someone like SEC Chair Paul Atkins or Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon or BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talking about stablecoins and tokenization,” he said. “Investors want to be a part of that.”

The interview and memo capture a broader shift in the ecosystem, where the most consequential developments may lie in infrastructure and regulatory clarity rather than in the daily ups-and-downs of the largest digital asset. Hougan argued that the technologies underpinning stablecoins and tokenized assets could provide the catalyst needed to pull crypto into a sustained bull market, framing new product breakthroughs and a broader class of investors as the drivers of the next cycle.

During discussions with advisers, several crypto rails and projects repeatedly surfaced as potential beneficiaries of this shift. Notable mentions included Ethereum, Solana, Canton (a network associated with cross-chain capabilities), Chainlink, and Avalanche. Participants also pointed to trading platforms such as Hyperliquid and crypto-native firms like Figure, Circle, and Coinbase as players positioned to capitalize on the evolving demand for tokenized and structured crypto exposures. The broader implication is a growing conviction that traditional wealth-management channels will increasingly allocate to crypto-enabled solutions rather than to naked BTC exposure alone.

In parallel, exchanges have been broadening their offerings beyond pure trading. Some have rolled out tokenized stock products—often outside the United States—to provide investors with access to popular equities and highly anticipated public offerings. The market’s interest in high-profile tokens and tokenized assets continues to grow even as the regulatory framework for such instruments remains a work in progress.

Against this backdrop, investors are watching how regulatory developments unfold, how Circle’s public-market performance evolves, and whether the shift toward stablecoins and tokenization translates into tangible inflows into crypto infrastructure and tokenized products. The combination of institutional curiosity, regulatory movement, and new product lines could shape the next phase of crypto adoption if these use cases prove durable and scalable.

Related coverage notes the evolving role of Bitcoin as a market canary in the face of broader risk-off dynamics, and how tokenization could influence correlations across asset classes in the months ahead.

Key takeaways

• Institutional advisers are increasingly prioritizing stablecoins and tokenization over direct Bitcoin exposure, signaling a potential shift in crypto investment emphasis.
• The performance and perception of Circle’s stock post-IPO illustrate the market’s appetite for crypto-related equities, even as broader crypto valuations move in a wider market cycle.
• Regulatory signals pointing toward tokenized stock trading could bolster institutional confidence and unlock new channels for capital inflows into tokenized assets.
• Advisers mentioned Ethereum, Solana, Canton, Chainlink, and Avalanche as prominent technologies likely to benefit from a broader adoption of tokenized and crypto-backed financial products.
• Exchanges expanding into tokenized stocks and services reflect a broader trend of crypto firms diversifying beyond trading into infrastructure, custody, and regulated investment products.

Shifting dynamics in advisory outreach and product focus

Bitwise’s memo crystallizes a notable shift in the conversations advisers are having about crypto. Rather than focusing on price trajectories or BTC as a solo investment thesis, many are asking how blockchain-based finance can synchronize with mainstream markets and regulatory expectations. The emphasis on stablecoins—designed to preserve value and enable seamless settlement—and on tokenization—the digitization of real-world assets like stocks and bonds—highlights a path toward integrated crypto-native solutions that can operate within traditional portfolios and risk controls.

Still, the path forward depends on how quickly the market can translate these technologies into scalable, compliant products. The regulatory environment, particularly around tokenized securities, will play a central role in determining the pace of adoption. If tokenized trading becomes more widely available within the framework of U.S. securities law, it could lower barriers for institutional investors to gain exposure to a broader set of assets via blockchain-enabled channels.

Regulatory signals, adoption, and the tokenization thesis

The SEC’s reported consideration of a tokenized-stock trading exemption signals a potential regulatory foothold for new investment vehicles. Such a framework could offer a clearer path for tokenized versions of well-known equities, making it easier for asset managers to include crypto-linked products in client portfolios. The potential impact on liquidity, price discovery, and cross-border trading is significant, though it will hinge on how the exemption is crafted and how disclosures and custodial controls are implemented.

On the corporate side, Circle’s IPO experience underscores the market’s appetite for crypto-native listings and related instruments. A peak near $240 for Circle’s stock, from an IPO price of $31, demonstrates strong initial demand, while the subsequent pullback to around $79 reflects broader crypto stock volatility and sector-wide pressures. The episode illustrates how crypto-linked equities can act as a barometer for investor sentiment toward the broader crypto ecosystem, even as fundamental adoption in payments and settlement accelerates.

Investors are also watching the ecosystem’s players—Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, and Avalanche—as potential beneficiaries of increased demand for tokenized assets and stablecoins. Platforms and firms such as Hyperliquid, Figure, and Coinbase are cited as example incumbents that could scale these capabilities. The convergence of exchange platforms, custody and settlement providers, and fintech-style trading tools signals a maturation of the crypto space where tokenized products become core offerings rather than niche experiments.

In the near term, the trajectory will depend on regulatory clarity, the speed with which institutional users can onboard to compliant platforms, and the ability of market participants to demonstrate real-world use cases that translate into measurable yield and risk-management benefits. If the new wave of institutional investment materializes around stablecoins and tokenization, it could provide a counterpoint to Bitcoin’s price cycles and augment the sector’s resilience in the face of macro shifts.

What remains to be seen is whether this shift will translate into a durable bull-case narrative for crypto, or if it will simply reflect a phase of exploration among institutions as they test regulatory boundaries and product suitability. Market observers will want to monitor regulator guidance on tokenized securities, the performance of Circle’s public listing, and the pace at which institutions begin allocating toward tokenized products at scale. As Hougan summarized, the conversation has moved beyond BTC price action toward the infrastructure and real-world use cases that could redefine crypto’s role in a diversified, institutionally accessible market.

Looking ahead, readers should keep an eye on regulatory developments surrounding tokenized assets, the continued expansion of stablecoins into mainstream financial infrastructure, and the performance of key platforms and issuers that could drive the next phase of institutional crypto adoption.