Lawmakers said they will oversee the investigation to ensure authorities hold Binance accountable if sanctions violations are confirmed.

Democratic Senators Chris Van Hollen, Elizabeth Warren, and Ruben Gallego confirmed that the United States Department of Justice is investigating whether crypto exchange Binance violated US sanctions laws by facilitating billions of dollars in transactions linked to Iran and entities associated with terrorism.

The lawmakers, all members of the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said the probe comes after their earlier request urging US authorities to examine the exchange’s compliance with sanctions regulations.

DOJ’s Binance Investigation

In a joint statement, the senators said the reported activity raises concerns that Binance may have helped enable financial flows connected to Iranian actors and their proxies despite existing restrictions under US law. They also accused the company of previously prioritizing profits over legal compliance and said the latest reports indicate the exchange could again be operating in ways that undermine sanctions enforcement.

The lawmakers added that they plan to conduct oversight to ensure the Justice Department carries out a thorough investigation and holds the company accountable if violations are confirmed.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice had started investigating whether Iran had used Binance to evade American sanctions. Binance pushed back against the allegations, while arguing that the media reports referenced in the Senate contain “false, unsupported, and defamatory claims.” Subsequent reports indicated that the exchange has filed a defamation lawsuit against the WSJ over the initial article that the publication released in late February.

Calls for Bipartisan Collaboration

While Binance has not yet released a statement regarding the development, it had previously noted that the federal courts in both the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of Alabama dismissed anti-terrorism claims brought against founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao by hundreds of plaintiffs. The exchange said that it remains fully committed to working collaboratively to enforce sanctions laws without compromise, and went on to add,

“Looking forward to collaborating with both Democrats and Republicans on this.”

TLDR:

• ASTER price has remained in a tight consolidation range between $0.67 and $0.74 for over a month despite broader crypto market weakness. 
• A major resistance zone between $0.75 and $0.80 continues to cap upward momentum, with sellers defending the level on multiple attempts. 
• The October 2025 liquidation event wiped out roughly $12.43 million in leveraged positions, largely resetting long exposure in the derivatives market. 
• Binance dominates ASTER futures trading, leading both daily volume and trade count while major exchanges hold significant open interest.

ASTER price continues trading in a narrow range after earlier volatility shook leveraged traders. The asset moves sideways while many cryptocurrencies decline, keeping attention on a resistance area near $0.80.

Market Stability Emerges After Earlier Decline

The ASTER price entered a consolidation after a sharp decline earlier in the market cycle. That drop triggered forced liquidations and removed a large portion of leveraged long exposure.

Since then, the asset has traded between roughly $0.67 and $0.74. The narrow range has remained intact for more than a month.

Market observers pointed to this behavior in recent commentary online. A widely circulated post stated that the asset outperformed the broader market by simply moving sideways.

The comment came from a tweet published by Nebraskangooner. The post noted that prolonged sideways trading can signal relative strength during weak market conditions.

Resistance Zone Continues To Limit Upward Moves

The consolidation range sits directly below a clear technical resistance zone. That area forms between approximately $0.75 and $0.80 on the trading chart.

The region previously provided support before the earlier breakdown. Market structure shifted when that support level turned into overhead resistance.

Price has approached that band several times during the consolidation period. Each attempt was met with resistance as sellers defended the level.

Despite the resistance, the asset has not moved sharply lower. Buyers continue to hold positions near the upper part of the range.

Liquidation Event Reset Leveraged Positions

Derivatives market data show a large liquidation event in October 2025. At that time of writing, ASTER price traded near $1.1575 before selling pressure increased.

Total liquidations reached approximately $12.43 million during that period. Long positions accounted for about $10.15 million of those liquidations.

The forced closures triggered a rapid decline in market price. The cascade occurred as leveraged traders failed to meet margin requirements.

Exchange data shows strong participation from major derivatives platforms. Binance and Bybit accounted for a large share of the liquidated positions.

Derivatives Activity Remains Concentrated On Major Exchanges

As of writing, derivatives metrics show large open interest across multiple trading platforms. The Aster exchange records the largest open interest near $120.98 million.

Binance follows with open interest close to $84.61 million. Hyperliquid holds the third position with roughly $60.23 million.

Trading activity remains concentrated on a few exchanges. Binance leads daily trading volume with roughly $69.97 million.

Futures trade count also favors the same platform. Binance processes more than 867,000 ASTER futures trades, exceeding activity on other exchanges.

TLDR:

• HyperCore removed 22,477 HYPE from circulation on March 13 alone, exceeding staking rewards issued that day
• At the current pace, roughly 8.09 million HYPE tokens will exit circulation over the next 12 months
• Solana inflates by ~25.19M SOL yearly; Hyperliquid’s model is moving in the exact opposite direction
• Buyback volume scales with HIP-3 trading activity, linking protocol growth directly to token supply reduction

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token is now shrinking in supply, not growing. On March 13, 2026, HyperCore repurchased 49,323 HYPE tokens at roughly $37.12 each. 

That same day, only 26,846 HYPE went out as staking and validator rewards. The net result: 22,477 tokens permanently removed from circulation in a single day.

HyperCore Buybacks Push HYPE Into Deflationary Territory

The numbers are straightforward. Buybacks exceeded distributions by over 22,000 tokens on March 13. At that pace, monthly removal reaches 674,310 HYPE. Annualized, that projects to roughly 8.09 million tokens leaving circulation each year.

That stands in sharp contrast to Solana. Solana’s staking and validator system inflates supply by approximately 25.19 million SOL annually. Hyperliquid is moving in the opposite direction entirely.

The buyback mechanism is also price-sensitive by design. When HYPE trades higher, each dollar buys fewer tokens. When prices fall, buybacks become more aggressive. This creates a natural counterweight to supply pressure during market downturns.

HyperCore funds buybacks using protocol revenue. That revenue flows primarily from trading activity across the network. More trades mean more fees, and more fees mean larger buybacks.

Protocol Revenue and HIP-3 Adoption Drive the Buyback Flywheel

The structure here matters. HIP-3 adoption feeds directly into trading volume. Higher volume generates more protocol revenue. That revenue funds the repurchase program. Larger repurchases deepen the deflationary effect.

According to data shared by Hyperliquid Hub on X, the March 13 buyback alone removed tens of thousands of tokens in one session. That is not a one-time event. It reflects an ongoing mechanical process tied to network usage.

Validators and stakers received 26,846 HYPE that day across 24 validators. That distribution is the only outflow in the equation. Everything repurchased beyond that figure is gone from the circulating supply permanently.

The buyback-to-reward ratio now favors deflation. That ratio can shift with price and volume. But the current trajectory shows a supply curve bending downward.

No other major layer-1 network is running this kind of structure at scale right now. The data from March 13 makes that clear.

TLDR:

• TON cancels Dubai event scheduled for May 1–2, citing safety concerns tied to the ongoing Middle East conflict. 
• TOKEN2049 postponed its Dubai conference to April 2027 due to regional uncertainty and travel disruptions. 
• TON Gateway ticket holders will receive full refunds within 14 days following the cancellation. 
• TOKEN2049 attendees can keep tickets for 2027 or transfer them to the Singapore conference this year

TON cancels Dubai event scheduled for May after escalating Middle East tensions raised safety concerns in the United Arab Emirates. Organizers confirmed the cancellation as regional attacks triggered travel disruptions and uncertainty for international crypto conference participants.

TON Cancels Dubai Event Over Security Concerns

TON cancels Dubai event planned for May 1 and May 2, 2026. Organizers cited security risks linked to the escalating Middle East conflict.

The Open Network shared the decision in a post on X. The organization stated that safety conditions in the region required canceling the conference.

“Unfortunately, due to the Middle East conflict and safety conditions in the UAE area, we have made the decision to cancel Gateway Dubai,” the statement said.

Gateway Dubai was designed to gather developers and builders working within the TON ecosystem. The event aimed to encourage collaboration across projects and teams.

Dubai remains a major destination for blockchain conferences and technology investors. However, recent military developments changed the regional security outlook.

Following strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran, retaliatory missile and drone attacks targeted the United Arab Emirates.

Reports indicated the UAE received a large share of the strikes during the exchange. Analysts linked the attacks to the country’s close cooperation with Western partners.

Travel disruptions soon followed across several Middle Eastern cities. Airlines adjusted schedules while many travelers reconsidered regional visits.

TON organizers acknowledged that many participants had already planned their travel. They said the cancellation decision came after reviewing the evolving situation.

Despite the cancellation, the TON team said it may organize another Gateway event later this year using a different format.

Participants who purchased tickets for the conference will receive refunds within fourteen days.

TOKEN2049 Postpones Dubai Conference Until 2027

Regional tensions also affected another major crypto gathering in Dubai. TOKEN2049 announced that its Dubai conference will not take place this year.

The organizers confirmed the update through a post shared on X. The event had been scheduled for April 29 and April 30.

“In collaboration with our partners and stakeholders, and in light of ongoing uncertainty in the region, TOKEN2049 Dubai will be postponed,” the announcement stated.

The conference will now take place on April 21 and April 22, 2027. Organizers said the change allows time for regional stability to improve.

TOKEN2049 usually attracts global blockchain founders, investors, and technology executives. The Dubai event was expected to host several well-known speakers.

Scheduled participants included Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan. Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino and Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire were also listed.

Attendees who purchased tickets will have multiple options following the postponement. They may keep their tickets for the 2027 conference.

Participants may also transfer their tickets to the TOKEN2049 Singapore event scheduled later this year.

Ticket prices for the Dubai conference ranged from $699 for early access. Standard passes reached $1,499, while premium packages cost $5,999.

Organizers encouraged attendees with travel bookings to contact airlines and hotels to modify reservations.

Bitcoin’s network has been running nonstop since 2009. The question nobody had rigorously answered until now is what it would actually take to break it.

Researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance last week published the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin blockchain’s resilience to physical infrastructure disruption, analyzing 11 years of peer-to-peer network data against 68 verified submarine cable fault events.

The headline finding is that between 72% and 92% of the world’s inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin experiences significant node disconnection.

In a world where the Strait of Hormuz is currently disrupted and infrastructure vulnerability is front of mind, the study provides the first empirical benchmark for how hard Bitcoin actually is to knock offline.

The numbers tell a story of a network that degrades gracefully rather than collapsing catastrophically. The researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario across the full dataset and found that random cable failures barely register.

Over 87% of the 68 real-world cable fault events they studied caused less than 5% node impact. The largest single event, when seabed disturbances off Côte d’Ivoire damaged 7-8 cables simultaneously in March 2024, knocked out 43% of regional nodes but affected only 5-7 bitcoin nodes globally, roughly 0.03% of the network.

The correlation between cable failures and bitcoin’s price was essentially zero, at -0.02. Infrastructure disruptions are invisible against daily price volatility.

But the paper’s most important finding is the asymmetry between random and targeted attacks.

While random cable failures require 72-92% removal to cause damage, a targeted attack on the cables with the highest betweenness centrality, the ones that serve as chokepoints between continents, drops that threshold to 20%.

And targeting the top five hosting providers by node count, Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud, requires removing just 5% of routing capacity to achieve the same impact.

That’s a fundamentally different threat model. Random failures are acts of nature. Targeted attacks are acts of state, coordinated regulatory shutdowns of hosting providers or deliberate severing of critical cable routes. The study essentially maps two very different adversaries: one Bitcoin can easily survive, and one that remains a credible risk.

How threats to bitcoin change over time

The paper tracks how resilience evolved over time, and the trajectory isn’t a straight line. Bitcoin was most resilient in its early years from 2014-2017, when the network was geographically diverse and the critical failure threshold sat around 0.90-0.92.

Resilience declined sharply during 2018-2021 as the network grew rapidly but concentrated geographically, hitting its lowest point of 0.72 in 2021 during peak mining concentration in East Asia. The China mining ban in 2021 forced redistribution, and resilience partially recovered to 0.88 in 2022 before settling at 0.78 in 2025.

The TOR finding is the one that challenges conventional thinking. As of 2025, 64% of Bitcoin nodes use TOR, making their physical location unobservable.

The assumption has been that this inability to observe might hide fragility, that if TOR nodes turned out to be geographically concentrated, the network could be more vulnerable than it appears.

The Cambridge researchers built a four-layer model to test this and found the opposite. TOR relay infrastructure is heavily concentrated in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, countries with extensive submarine cable and land border connectivity.

An attacker trying to disrupt TOR relay capacity by cutting cables faces a compound problem because those countries are among the hardest to disconnect. The four-layer model consistently showed higher resilience than the clearnet-only baseline, with TOR adding between 0.02 and 0.10 to the critical failure threshold.

The paper frames this as “adaptive self-organization.” TOR adoption surged after censorship events like Iran’s internet shutdown in 2019, the Myanmar coup in 2021, and the China mining ban.

The Bitcoin community shifted toward censorship-resistant infrastructure without any central coordination, and that shift happened to also make the network physically harder to disrupt.

With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and a regional war disrupting infrastructure across the Middle East, the question of what happens to Bitcoin if submarine cables get damaged isn’t theoretical.

The study suggests the answer is probably nothing, unless someone is deliberately targeting the specific cables and hosting providers that matter most.

Key takeaways:

• Bitcoin sits above $71,000 as weak US economic data and the US and Israel-Iran war drive investors toward scarce assets.

• Tech stocks’ correlation to BTC and rising oil prices suggest that the 5-month correction from $126,000 might not be over.

Bitcoin (BTC) jumped above $73,000 on Friday, successfully locking in the 70,000 support for the week. These gains occurred as the US reported weak economic activity data, triggering concerns of an impending recession while the war in Iran continues to drag on.

While socio-economic events and institutional inflows might have led to Bitcoin’s bullish momentum, traders are still questioning if the bear market has actually ended.

Economic turmoil, growing investor appetite for BTC back Bitcoin’s breakout

The US economy grew by a mere 0.7% between October and December 2025, which was a significant downgrade from previous estimates, according to a US Commerce Department report released on Friday. While the final report is due April 9, the risks of a recession throughout 2026 have increased, driving investors away from US Treasuries.

Yields on the US 10-year Treasury surged to 4.26%, meaning investors are demanding a higher return to hold those assets. The mere risk of additional liquidity causes traders to seek shelter in scarce assets. This partially explains why the S&P 500 traded just 5% below its all-time high despite the worsening economic conditions.

On Monday, the S&P 500 futures plummeted to their lowest levels in over three months after oil prices briefly surged to $119.50. The US decision to temporarily authorize the purchase of Russian oil stranded at sea helped to cool off some of the risks. This move, announced by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday, eased the markets’ short-term concerns.

Institutional demand for Bitcoin has also been signaled as a potential driver for the recent bullish momentum. Spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) faced four consecutive days of net inflows totaling $583 million, while analysts estimate that Strategy (MSTR) accumulated over $900 million through the yield-bearing STRC instrument.

Related: Bitcoin’s ‘extremely precise’ macro signal puts $100K target back in play

Bitcoin’s momentum turned bullish, but the bear market carries on

At first glance, the economic backdrop points toward liquidity injections and rising institutional interest in Bitcoin. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the five-month correction following the $126,000 peak in October 2025 has ended. 

Bitcoin’s 50-day correlation with the Nasdaq 100 sits at 84%. As concerns grow over sticky inflation and stagnant economic growth, the odds of a stock market pullback increase. Traders are unlikely to use Bitcoin as a hedge, especially given its recent underperformance compared to gold.

Adding to this, oil prices remain $30 higher than levels seen before the war in Iran began. These high fuel costs hit consumer spending and create inflationary pressure, which reduces the capital retail traders have available for crypto investments.

Inflows to the spot BTC ETFs have surged as $2.14 billion entered the ETFs from Feb. 24 to March 4, driving a 14% rally. However, prices slipped 10% over the next four days as those flows reversed. This suggests spot ETF activity is just reacting to Bitcoin’s price rather than acting as a leading indicator.

Whether Bitcoin stays above $70,000 over the weekend may not shift investor sentiment. While a five-week consolidation and several tests of the $64,000 support show bulls’ confidence, the recent price action hasn’t delivered a clear signal for a breakout.