Crypto World
China’s Offshore Trading Crackdown Could Unleash a New Wave of Crypto Capital Flight
China’s securities regulator is shutting down mainland operations of major online brokers Tiger Brokers, Futu Holdings, and Longbridge over a two-year wind-down. These are online brokerage platforms based in Hong Kong and overseas that let users trade US, Hong Kong, and other global stocks from their phones.
Mainland Chinese investors flocked to them because they offered cheap, easy access to foreign markets like US equities. Now, some of that frozen capital could flow into crypto channels like USDT and OTC desks.
What the CSRC Crackdown Targets
The cases name Tiger Brokers (NZ) Limited, Futu Securities International (Hong Kong) Limited, and Longbridge Securities (Hong Kong) Limited.
Each entity allegedly handled trading orders, public fund sales, and futures brokerage for mainland customers without a Chinese license.
According to the CSRC, the firms violated the Securities Law, the Securities Investment Fund Law, and the Futures and Derivatives Law.
The agency plans to seize all illegal gains from the domestic and overseas units involved in the business.
“In accordance with relevant regulations, the CSRC intends to confiscate all illegal gains of Tiger Brokers (NZ) Limited, Futu Securities International (Hong Kong) Limited, and Changqiao Securities International (Hong Kong) Limited, both domestically and internationally, and impose severe penalties according to law,” local media reported.
Existing mainland users will only be allowed to sell positions and withdraw funds during the two-year wind-down. New deposits and new buy orders are blocked immediately.
After the cleanup window, the platforms must shut their China-facing websites, apps, and servers.
Legal overseas routes such as the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) program and the Hong Kong Stock Connect stay open.
The FUTU and TIGR stocks dipped on the news and were trading for $123.84 and $5.84, respectively, as of this writing.
Why Crypto Rails Could Absorb Some of the Flow
China’s $50,000 annual foreign exchange quota leaves most retail investors with little legal room to move money offshore.
Tiger and Futu filled that gap for years through grey-market onboarding. Their mainland clients have driven a large share of trading revenue at both firms.
With those accounts frozen, demand could rotate toward over-the-counter (OTC) desks and peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges.
These channels form the main route for Chinese traders bypassing restrictions, often running through offshore platforms accessed via VPN.
Tether’s USDT remains the dominant on-ramp. Underground brokers have routinely sold USDT at premium prices against the yuan during past capital flight episodes.
A similar premium could return if Tiger and Futu’s mainland clients shift to crypto.
The wider stablecoin dollar dominance trend shows how quickly USD-pegged tokens can fill gaps left by TradFi. Industry estimates put the number of Chinese crypto users at over 20 million despite the 2021 ban.
Legal Channels Survive, But Crypto Faces Its Own Wall
The QDII program, Cross-border Wealth Management Connect, and the Hong Kong Stock Connect remain open.
However, those routes carry strict quotas, higher fees, and limited product menus. None of them match the speed or breadth of US stock access Tiger and Futu offered.
“Bitcoin as a Limitless Haven: Unlike traditional investments, Bitcoin has no QDII/QFII limits…Chinese fund houses face overseas investment quotas under the QDII program… quotas are quickly reached daily, leading to premiums… quotas are maxed out, halting some mutual funds… tired of the restrictions…,” analyst Kyle Chasse stated.
Crypto is also far from a safe substitute. Beijing has spent 2026 widening its position against private digital assets.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the CSRC expanded China’s sweeping crypto ban in February. The notice now covers stablecoins and tokenization activity.
The same February policy, which marked China’s stablecoin enforcement push, targets foreign issuers that offer services to Chinese residents.
Any large rotation into USDT or on-chain US equity products would likely draw similar scrutiny.
The brokers have the right to a hearing before final penalties are issued. Beijing’s two-year deadline gives regulators time to monitor where displaced capital lands.
The post China’s Offshore Trading Crackdown Could Unleash a New Wave of Crypto Capital Flight appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Bitcoin is trading at $77.3k to close out the week, locked in a consolidation that has now been running for nearly two weeks around the $75k–$80k range. The ascending channel from February is intact, the short-term support zone at $75k is holding, and the funding rates are positive again. This shows a market that is neither panicking nor rushing. What is building beneath the surface may matter more than what the price chart is showing.
Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart
On the daily timeframe, the ascending channel continues to provide the macro framework, with the lower boundary rising toward $72k and the 100-day moving average also rising just above the same zone.
These two dynamic support elements are located closely and create a strengthening combined floor that closes in on the price every week. The asset has held above the $75k demand zone after getting tested in the past week, and the RSI has stabilized around 50, neither building momentum nor losing it.
The path forward requires a daily close above $80k and the declining 200-day moving average nearby, to build a bullish case again. Below, the support zone at $75k is the immediate support that could still get broken to the downside, which would then open the path toward the 100-day moving average and the lower boundary of the channel.
Ultimately, a daily close below $72k would be a significant structural damage that could put the entire recovery case in jeopardy, and would put the $60 demand zone back in scope.
BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart
On the 4-hour chart, the price has bounced from the $75k–$76k order block and is now consolidating directly below the recent structural lower high at $78.2k. The RSI on this timeframe has also recovered from near oversold levels that were reached during the recent sell-off to the mid-50s. This suggests that the bounce has legs without yet generating the momentum needed to clear the resistance above.
The ascending daily channel’s structure is clean, with the floor located at $70k and the upper boundary is now around $83k, where the next critical resistance zone also sits.
A 4-hour close above $78k would be the first confirmation that the price is rebounding, with the bearish Fair Value Gap zone around $80k as the next area to fill before targeting the channel’s ceiling. Yet, failure to clear $78k and a drop below $75k could lead to a further decline toward the key $72k area in the coming weeks.
Sentiment Analysis
The funding rates have returned to a modest +0.004 after oscillating between slightly negative and slightly positive for the past two weeks. The important development is not the current reading in isolation but what it represents in context.
The deeply negative funding that powered the $60k to $80k recovery by providing constant short-squeeze fuel for every upward leg has been largely exhausted. The most recent negative bars have also been shallow, compared to the extremes of February and April.
What this means practically is that the $75k support is holding without the assistance of forced short liquidations, driving the bounce. That is a more credible test of support than anything seen during the short-squeeze-dominated rally. The level is being defended by buyers who are choosing to buy, not by shorts being forced to cover.
If funding oscillates near zero or remains modestly positive as price attempts to reclaim $80k, it would signal that organic long demand is beginning to replace short-squeeze mechanics as the driver, and historically, that transition has marked the point where recoveries become sustainable.
The post Bitcoin Price Prediction: Will BTC Stay Stuck in Consolidation Through the Weekend? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Brent oil price trades at $104.70 on May 22, sitting below one critical technical level. President Trump’s call for a fast Iran deal is pulling the geopolitical risk premium out of crude.
Hedge funds are cutting longs, put hedging is climbing, and the chart is testing channel support. The three signals are now lining up for a critical Brent crude test.
Trump’s Iran Talks Pull Brent Oil Toward a Channel Break
President Trump told the country this week that the Iran war would end “fast”. He added that oil prices would drop sharply once a deal is reached.
The statement marks the clearest de-escalation signal from the White House this month. Geopolitical risk had been the main bid under crude since April.
Want more insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Newsletter here.
Brent has been climbing inside an ascending parallel channel since April 17. The structure is a bullish formation where price rises between two parallel upward trendlines.
The recent slide has pushed Brent against the channel’s lower boundary. A clean break of that line would flip the trend from bullish to neutral/bearish, opening downside for the first time in five weeks. That bearish lean is already showing up in the speculative positioning data.
Speculators Cut Longs as Put-Call Hedging Builds
The CFTC Crude Oil speculative net positions report tracks long minus short positions held by hedge funds and non-commercial traders. The reading peaked at 233,600 contracts the week ending March 28.
The latest May 16 release shows positions at 169,900. That marks a drop of nearly 64,000 contracts, a 27% reduction in seven weeks.
The shift signals fund managers are pulling bullish bets as the geopolitical risk premium fades. The options market is now confirming that move.
BNO is the United States Brent Oil ETF, the main US-listed proxy for Brent crude. Its put-call ratio measures put option activity against call activity, where readings below 1.0 lean bullish.
The volume ratio doubled from 0.15 on May 15 to 0.30 on May 21.
The volume jump means fresh put hedging is rolling in. Overall positioning stays bullish, but the directional conviction is softening fast. Three signals now align with the macro catalyst. The chart confirms the same story.
Brent Oil Price Levels Hinge on $100 Test
Brent oil price sits at $104.70 after losing the 20-day EMA at $105.41. The next test is the 50-day EMA at $100.27.
That level overlaps with the 0.5 Fibonacci level at $100.83. The Fibonacci level maps potential support and resistance based on the prior major move. The confluence puts the $100 round number squarely in focus.
A clean break below $100 confirms the channel breakdown. The measured move target sits at $86.37. Between current price and the measured move, intermediate stops include $97.42 and $92.56.
The 200-day EMA at $82.43 marks the ultimate structural floor. Below that, the 1.618 extension at $68.49 opens up.
For the bullish thesis to hold, Brent needs to reclaim $108.47 quickly. A daily close above $115.30 would invalidate the bearish setup entirely.
The $100 line separates a clean channel hold from a slide toward the $86 measured move target.
The post Brent Oil Price Risks Drop Below $100 as Trump’s Iran Talks Trigger Long Exodus appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Attackers have reportedly hit prediction market platform Polymarket with a private key hack and stolen roughly $700,000 worth of crypto.
Crypto sleuth ZachXBT first flagged the attack earlier today, noting, “A Polymarket deployer address appears to have been compromised on Polygon.”
Crypto security firm Bubblemaps later confirmed that an exploit was underway and that the hacker was stealing 5,000 POL ($460) every 30 seconds.
It added that the stolen funds were split across 16 addresses before being moved to centralised crypto exchanges, and that ~$700,000 has been stolen so far.
Polymarket’s developer X account said it is aware of the incident “linked to rewards payout,” and claimed, “user funds and market resolution are safe.”
It claimed, “Findings point to a private key compromise of a wallet used for internal top-up operations, not contracts or core infrastructure.”
Read more: Are Polymarket and Kalshi decentralized?
Polymarket developer Josh Stevens also noted that the incident is “not a contract hack,” and that it’s likely a compromise of an old private key.
The funds were taken from a crypto address associated with Polymarket’s UMA system, the platform’s oracle system that relies on tokenholders to resolve disputes on disputed outcomes.
The attacker’s last transaction from this UMA address was at 09:00 UTC, roughly 40 minutes before time of writing.
Week of hacks, insider trading, and inquiries for Polymarket
It’s been a turbulent week for Polymarket, with the firm also being the subject of an inquiry in South Korea over potential gambling violations.
The country’s Korea Communications Standards Commission wants to know if the platform’s services constitute gambling.
Bubblemaps also suspects that a large case of insider trading has been taking place on the platform that involves the leaking of US military secrets.
Read more: Polymarket users try manipulate Israeli journalist with death threats, report
Bubblemaps claims that nine accounts were able to make over $2.4 million betting on military markets with a 98% win rate.
The firm has repeatedly drawn criticism over insider trading, and has witnessed suspicious trades on markets involving Israeli strikes against Iran and the US’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Polymarket launched a new type of trading this week that allows users to bet on future valuations, IPO timings, and secondary share price action involving private companies such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic.
Polymarket also reportedly appointed a Japanese representative as it lobbies for regulatory approval within Japan.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Germany’s Finance Committee has voted down a Green Party proposal that would have ended the country’s tax exemption for crypto assets held longer than one year.
The bill, introduced by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, argued the existing rule was designed for physical assets like antiques stored in basements, not digital currencies.
Under current German law, Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies are exempt from capital gains tax when held for more than 12 months.
Four Factions, Four Different Objections
The CDU/CSU opposed the measure on fairness grounds, arguing it would create a new inconsistency rather than resolve an existing one. Under the Greens’ proposal, crypto assets would be taxed differently from comparable stores of value such as precious metals and foreign currencies. Germany has cultivated a crypto-friendly reputation largely because of rules like the one-year exemption.
The AfD rejected the bill on broader fiscal grounds, arguing Germany should reduce the scope of taxation rather than expand it. The party contended the state should focus on core functions such as domestic and foreign security and the justice system.
The SPD took a softer position. While the party supports crypto taxation in principle, it said it would hold off on specific legislation until Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil presents his own proposals. The SPD’s stance reflects the broader German crypto policy debate as the EU tightens oversight under MiCA.
Only Die Linke backed the Greens, but pointed to weaknesses in the draft. The party flagged significant administrative complexity and a missing cap on loss offsets from crypto trades, a gap it warned could erode net fiscal gains considerably.
€11.4 Billion Crypto Revenue Estimate Not Enough to Persuade
The Greens cited research from the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center projecting up to €11.4 billion in additional annual tax revenue. The party used roughly half that figure in its own calculations, citing conservative budgeting. The study found that German crypto investors realized €47.3 billion in gains in 2024, with nearly two-thirds escaping tax under the holding-period rule.
With the bill defeated, Germany’s one-year crypto tax rules stay unchanged even as 2026 brings new reporting requirements for investors across Europe. The coming months will show whether Klingbeil’s proposals reopen the debate or shelve it entirely.
The post Germany’s Finance Committee Rejects Bid to End Crypto Tax Exemption appeared first on BeInCrypto.
CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2085.44, down 0.0% (-0.18) since 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.
Fourteen of the 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: NEAR (+19.4%) and ICP (+4.3%).
Laggards: SUI (-2.6%) and XRP (-1.0%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), the parent company of Truth Social, has transferred another 2,650 bitcoin to Crypto.com in a move that is likely to intensify scrutiny of the company’s struggling cryptocurrency strategy.
At current market prices, the transfer is worth roughly $205 million, with bitcoin trading at approximately $77,341 per token. Blockchain data shows the deposit occurred during late U.S. evening hours, according to Lookonchain, marking the latest significant movement in the company’s digital asset holdings.
Trump Media originally purchased 11,542 BTC for approximately $1.37 billion at an average acquisition price of $118,522 per bitcoin. The latest transfer follows an earlier move four months ago, when the company shifted out 2,000 BTC valued at roughly $175 million at the time, with bitcoin trading near $87,378.
Following the newest transaction, Trump Media is now estimated to be down roughly $455 million on its bitcoin holdings as the cryptocurrency continues to trade well below the company’s average purchase price.
The latest crypto transfer comes just days after Trump Media withdrew its application for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund, raising fresh questions about the company’s ambitions in the increasingly crowded crypto investment market. ETF analysts said the decision appeared to be driven less by structural or regulatory concerns and more by deteriorating economics across the spot bitcoin ETF sector.
The company’s financial results have also come under pressure from its aggressive cryptocurrency positioning. In May, Trump Media reported a staggering first-quarter net loss of $405.9 million on just $871,200 in revenue, widening sharply from a $31.7 million loss reported during the same period a year earlier.
Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies and co-founder of Fundstrat, does not expect the coming wave of mega IPOs to derail markets even if they could eclipse the entire dot-com boom in scale.
Lee recently discussed the potential effect of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI listing which could unleash trillions of dollars in new equity supply into public markets.
In inflation adjusted terms, Elon Musk’s SpaceX alone could become the second largest IPO ever, seeking a market valuation above $1.5 trillion, behind only Saudi Aramco.
Lee acknowledged concerns about the amount of supply these listings could introduce into public markets, especially after the standard 90-day lock-up periods expire. He noted that SpaceX is likely the most anticipated IPO ever, Lee estimates the three IPOs could generate trillions in supply, equivalent to roughly 5% to 6% of the S&P 500’s total market capitalization.
Despite the scale, Lee does not believe the situation is necessarily outright bearish for the markets. He argues that family offices, pensions, and high net worth investors currently hold historically low allocations to public equities after years of favoring private markets and alternative investments.
There is significant capital available to absorb the liquidity as allocations rotate back toward U.S. public stocks, in Lee’s view.
He also expects many early investors to hedge or borrow against holdings rather than immediately sell and trigger large tax events.
Lee also discussed cryptocurrency’s underperformance against expectations despite growing institutional interest, highlighting how instant settlement and transaction verification are driving Wall Street’s push towards tokenisation, a point he previously made at Consensus Miami 2026.
Furthermore, Lee believes blockchain could provide a neutral framework for identity verification in an AI driven world. Banks are increasingly circling the industry because they recognize the significant revenue opportunities emerging from the convergence of crypto, AI, and finance, he added.
Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and OKX announced Friday that they are joining forces to roll out perpetual oil futures.
In a joint statement, the firms’ said ICE’s futures prices for Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will bolster the new perpetual contracts on OKX.
The new perpetual contracts based on ICE’s data will open energy benchmark product access to OKX’s 120 million retail traders, said Trabue Bland, senior vice president of futures exchanges at ICE.
The new contracts will be available on OKX, in which ICE holds a stake, across territories where the crypto company is already licensed to offer perpetual futures.
“Oil markets are critical to the world economy,” Haider Rafique, global managing partner at OKX, said in the statement. Bringing ICE’s benchmarks “into regulated perpetual futures is exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been asking for.”
The ICE and OKX foray into oil perps comes as Hyperliquid’s oil futures contracts that never expire have proven to be a tremendous success, consistently generating roughly $1.6 billion in daily trading volume and more than $1.3 billion in open interest.
Perpetual futures, also known as “perps,” are a type of derivative contract that give traders the ability to bet on prices of assets such as oil or bitcoin. But unlike traditional futures, perps never expire, so traders don’t have to take possession of physical barrels of oil or roll over those contracts.
Most perpetual products are offered on offshore exchanges and are not regulated the same way traditional commodity exchanges such as ICE and CME Group Inc. are in the U.S., but Michael Selig, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), recently said he will bring them under his agency’s oversight soon.
In a sign of the increasing confluence of crypto and traditional financial (TradFi) firms, ICE and OKX signed a deal in March to build technology, including blockchain networks, that would give ICE’s customers access to crypto-based futures and OKX customers the ability to trade tokenized securities on NYSE’s platform. ICE also made a strategic investment valuing the San Jose, California-based company at $25 billion.
Polymarket confirmed a security exploit affected part of its infrastructure, pointing to a possible private key compromise involving a wallet used for top-up operations, while saying user funds and market resolution were safe.
In a Friday X post, Polymarket developers said contracts and core infrastructure were unaffected. Polymarket product lead Akanshu Jain and multiple other Polymarket employees also said user funds and market resolution are safe.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT first flagged the exploit as a compromise to the Polymarket-linked UMA Conditional Tokens Framework (CTF) Adapter contract on Polygon, with the exploiter draining at least $520,000.
However, Josh Stevens, Polymarket’s vice president of engineering, said the contracts were safe and that the exploit was limited to a six-year-old private key used for internal top-up operations. All permissions tied to the key have been revoked, he said.
The UMA CTF adapter is an oracle contract used to help resolve Polymarket prediction markets through UMA’s Optimistic Oracle. Polymarket is the world’s second-largest prediction market with $3.7 billion in monthly trading volume, according to DefiLlama.
Polyscan data reviewed by Cointelegraph showed more than 100 small transfers into the alleged attacker wallet. Most were worth up to 5,000 Polygon (POL) tokens.
Address of the alleged Polymarket adapter contract attacker. Source: Polygonscan
Exploit losses climb past $600,000
Multiple blockchain data platforms reported similar onchain activity tied to the suspected exploit.
Blockchain data visualization platform Bubblemaps said in a Friday X post that the attacker continues to remove about 5,000 POL tokens every 30 seconds, amassing about $600,000 in stolen funds so far.
Source: Bubblemaps
Blockchain data platform Lookonchain estimated that about $660,000 was drained from the Polymarket-linked contract as of 9:01 am UTC on Friday.
Related: Crypto VC funding plunges to $659M in April, hits near two-year low
Polymarket integrated UMA’s optimistic oracle solution on Feb. 3, 2022, enabling automated and decentralized resolution for its prediction market contracts.
Cointelegraph contacted Polymarket and UMA for comment but had not received a response by publication.
Magazine: The legal battle over who can claim DeFi’s stolen millions
Ark Invest bought $5 million worth of Bullish (BLSH) stock on Thursday, the fourth day in a row it has added BLSH shares to its exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Cathie Wood’s investment manager has purchased $12.5 million worth of shares in the crypto group, which is also CoinDesk’s parent company, since Monday based on the stock’s closing prices, according to emailed disclosures.
BLSH shares closed 0.2% lower at $35.96 on Thursday, having fallen more than 17% in the last two weeks, a period in which bitcoin struggled to break above the $80,000 resistance.
Ark frequently uses broader digital asset downturns, which tend to pull crypto equities lower, as an entry point into cryptocurrency companies.
Use BetMGM bonus code CBSSPORTS to get $1,500 in bonus bets for Thunder-Spurs, Avalanche-Golden Knights Friday
FBI warns of Kali365 as device code phishing soars
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