Mark Cuban has dumped most of his Bitcoin, calling it “not the hedge I expected” as the Iran war and dollar volatility exposed what he sees as a failed safe haven narrative.

“I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold,” Cuban said. “But gold just blew up and went to $5,000. Bitcoin dropped.”
“This might get some people upset,” he added. “I think Bitcoin has lost the plot.”

Cuban’s hedge thesis breaks, but the data fights back

According to the Bitcoin (BTC) price page from crypto.news, BTC recently hovered in the mid $70,000s, reinforcing that the asset has recovered sharply from early conflict lows even if it remains below its peak.

Cuban’s own positioning underscores the reversal. Heading into 2026, he said his crypto portfolio was roughly 60% Bitcoin, 30% Ethereum and 10% other tokens, a structure he previously justified by calling BTC “a better store of value asset than gold.”
Now he says he still holds Ethereum for its “utility” while dismissing most altcoins as “junk,” effectively recasting Bitcoin as the disappointment in a portfolio he once described as anchored by BTC.

War, inflation and the safe haven narrative

The clash between Cuban’s experience and the data comes as the broader market reassesses what, exactly, Bitcoin hedges.
As crypto.news has previously reported in its coverage of how Bitcoin outperforms gold by roughly 36% since the Iran war began, BTC has behaved less like a classic “panic bid” asset and more like a high beta macro instrument that still managed to beat traditional havens over the war’s first months.

In its own report on Cuban’s remarks, crypto.news noted that “Bitcoin defenders” argue the billionaire cherry picked the worst window: BTC did sell off on initial Iran headlines, but from the first signs of conflict it has risen more than 16%, while gold has sagged.
Fortune similarly observed that “since the start of the war, the original cryptocurrency is up about 7%, and on Wednesday was trading at around $71,000,” even as gold drifted near $5,240 per ounce.

Cuban’s broader skepticism comes after years of vocal support, including a 2021 podcast appearance where he revealed that 60% of his crypto holdings were in Bitcoin and insisted he would “never sell it for anything” because it was superior to gold as a store of value.
With that stance now reversed, his sale has become a Rorschach test for the market: either a high profile confirmation that the “digital gold” story is broken, or, as some traders suggest and as earlier crypto.news coverage of Bitcoin’s performance during crises implies, an exquisitely mistimed capitulation top in a still evolving hedge narrative.

Other crypto.news reporting on war driven flows into gold tokenization and renewed institutional interest in Ethereum suggests that the safe haven debate is fragmenting across assets rather than converging on a single “digital bunker.”
For now, Cuban’s verdict is blunt: Bitcoin, he says, “lost the plot” – even as the numbers stubbornly refuse to give him the clean failure he thinks he saw in real time.

Bitcoin has clawed back losses to trade near $74,000 after President Donald Trump abruptly announced an end to the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, easing weeks of geopolitical pressure on crypto and oil markets.

In a Truth Social post, US President announced the end of the Hormuz naval blockade, spurring a reaction from crypto and stock markets around the world.

Bitcoin (BTC) erased a multi day slide and reclaimed roughly $74,000 on Friday after Trump declared that the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “has ended,” drawing a line under a standoff that had repeatedly whipsawed the world’s largest cryptocurrency since early April.

The move marks a sharp reversal from mid April, when Bitcoin briefly plunged toward $71,000 after Trump first ordered the naval blockade and oil prices spiked on fears that a fifth of global seaborne crude could be choked off.

On Friday, traders treated the end of the blockade as an all clear signal to rotate back into risk, unwinding some of the “war premium” that had built up in both crude and crypto options markets, with Bitcoin spot leading the bounce.

Trump blinks on Hormuz

Trump’s announcement caps weeks of brinkmanship that began when he ordered U.S. forces to “blockade the Strait of Hormuz” after peace talks with Iran collapsed in early April, a decision that immediately knocked Bitcoin from the mid $73,000s toward $71,000 and sent oil above $100 per barrel.

As the standoff dragged on, Washington insisted that “freedom of navigation” for non Iranian vessels would be preserved even as Iranian ships and ports remained under pressure, a nuance that helped Bitcoin bounce back above $72,000 once traders realized the blockade would be partial rather than absolute.

According to one U.S. briefing cited by market commentary, the administration calculated that closing the waterway entirely could cost Iran “about $500 million a day in revenue,” underscoring how much economic leverage was at stake as both sides postured over the channel.

Bitcoin’s geopolitical stress test

The end of the blockade comes after a month in which Bitcoin repeatedly proved resilient to Middle East headlines, refusing to sustain breaks below $70,000 even as Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iranian power plants if Hormuz was not reopened within 48 hours and later rejected Tehran’s “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” counterproposal on a broader peace plan.

In mid April, BTC briefly traded above $74,000 as Iran signaled it would keep the strait open and a tentative ceasefire took hold, with one market note flagging spot led buying and a realized price near $74,000 as evidence that structural demand remained intact despite war risk.

Earlier this month, Bitcoin even whipsawed around $82,000 after Trump rebuffed a new Iranian offer and vowed the blockade would continue “UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE,” a post that triggered roughly $410 million in short liquidations in 24 hours as BTC first slid, then snapped higher.

Crypto’s latest relief rally now shifts attention back to macro and structural drivers that had been overshadowed by Hormuz: exchange traded fund flows, halvingside supply dynamics and the broader debate over whether Bitcoin is behaving more like digital gold or a high beta proxy on risk assets as it chops between the high $60,000s and mid $80,000s.

In recent weeks, crypto.news has tracked how Bitcoin held near $80,000 after Trump rejected an earlier Iran proposal, as well as how BTC steadied when Iran moved to “fully reopen” Hormuz even while the U.S. blockade on Iranian ships remained in force, and how the token continues to trade each ceasefire headline “by headline.”

With the naval blockade now formally lifted and BTC back around $74,000, the next test for bulls is whether the market can finally escape its war zone range and re focus on domestic U.S. policy battles over initiatives like Trump’s Digital Asset Market Clarity Act and the longer term institutional bid underneath the price.

TLDR:

• Midnight Network went live on March 30, 2026, with nine institutional-grade nodes producing blocks in a federated phase.
• Six dApp proposals merged between May 8–19, spanning DeFi, medical consent, and supply-chain traceability use cases.
• Compact DSL compiles TypeScript-like contract code directly into ZK circuits, enabling three programmable disclosure modes per dApp.
• Two stablecoin proposals are under review, which are critical for enabling functional trading pairs on already-approved DEX platforms.

Midnight Network is redefining blockchain privacy through a programmable disclosure model that moves beyond the traditional binary approach.

Rather than forcing projects to choose between full transparency or complete shielding, the Cardano partner chain allows contracts to specify exactly which data fields are visible and to whom.

Since mainnet launched on March 30, 2026, in a federated phase, the network has already merged six third-party dApp deployment requests across key sectors including DeFi, healthcare, and supply-chain management.

Midnight’s Technical Architecture Enables Selective Data Visibility

The network runs on three core components that work together to enable this disclosure model. Compact, a TypeScript-like domain-specific language, compiles contract source directly into zero-knowledge circuits.

The Kachina protocol processes private state transitions off-chain and submits only the ZK proof to the ledger. A dual-state ledger then maintains public and shielded state in separate stores.

This structure supports three disclosure modes within a single contract. Data can be committed openly to the chain as public, decrypted by specified parties through auditor mode, or kept entirely private with only a ZK proof visible.

All three modes are already active on midnight.city, the official AI-agent simulation running since February 26, 2026.

The network also separates its token functions deliberately. NIGHT handles value and governance, while DUST is a shielded, non-transferable resource covering transaction fees.

This keeps operational costs out of counterparty visibility and removes MEV as a structural concern for institutional flows.

Nine institutional-grade nodes currently produce blocks: Google Cloud, MoneyGram, Vodafone’s Pairpoint division, eToro, Worldpay, Bullish, AlphaTON Capital, Blockdaemon, and Shielded Technologies.

Decentralization will follow in subsequent phases as Cardano stake pool operators begin producing blocks for both networks.

dApp Deployment Pipeline Reflects Diverse Real-World Use Cases

Between May 8 and 19, 2026, six dApp proposals merged into the Midnight Improvement Proposal repository. These covered a spot order-book DEX, a hybrid AMM DEX, a perpetuals contract, a medical consent registry, an ambassador directory, and a fishery traceability log.

Four more proposals remain under review, including two stablecoins, one NFT project, and one payment application.

Each proposal undergoes a risk assessment across three axes: Privacy-at-risk, Value-at-risk, and State-space-at-risk.

The gyotak fishery traceability contract scored 1/1/1 across all three, committing hashes of GPS, photo, and species data per catch.

NexiFuse, the medical consent registry, scored 2 on the privacy axis since consent graph leakage remains regulated PII.

The two stablecoin proposals currently under review are particularly relevant. The merged DEXs require a stable unit of account before meaningful trading pairs can function. This points toward composability as the next development layer taking shape on the network.

Analytical tooling for ZK circuit correctness, metadata boundaries, and off-chain trust models is developing alongside these first dApps, positioning Midnight for regulated finance and healthcare workloads at scale.

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is urging regulators to allow regulated exchanges to offer 24/7 onchain perpetual futures trading, according to ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher.

Speaking at a Bernstein conference on Wednesday, Sprecher said that he was urging regulators to create a “level playing field” for launching 24/7 onchain perps contracts, arguing that regulators are “prohibiting us from doing this when it’s already happening.” 

The CEO said that ICE had multiple exploratory discussions with decentralized exchange Hyperliquid about the synergies between the crypto and traditional finance (TradFi) industries, where ICE sought to “learn” more about onchain perps.

The comments are the latest testament on how more TradFi companies are exploring ways to enable 24/7 trading for stocks and commodities via blockchain rails, following Hyperliquid’s success. 

The remarks come a week after OKX said it will introduce perpetual futures based on ICE’s Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude benchmarks, two of the world’s most widely used oil price indicators, Cointelegraph reported on May 22.

The trading products are the first initiative announced under a broader partnership between  ICE and OKX, after ICE invested in the cryptocurrency exchange at a $25 billion valuation in March.

Earlier in March, the NYSE also partnered with tokenization platform Securitize as part of a broader effort to develop blockchain-based stock trading infrastructure with 24/7 trading and settlement for Wall Street.

Cointelegraph has approached ICE for comment on whether the exchange operator was planning to launch an onchain perps trading platform via Hyperliquid.

Related: UK proposes near-24/7 settlement to prepare markets for tokenization

Hyperliquid is “bigger than Nasdaq,” says ICE CEO

Sprecher praised Hyperliquid’s rapid growth as a trading platform, which facilitated the creation of multiple new billionaires, said the CEO, adding:

“If you haven’t heard about it, it’s bigger than Nasdaq, okay? It’s 11 people.”

Hyperliquid remains far smaller than Nasdaq by conventional trading volume measures, but Sprecher’s comment underscored the pressure that always-on crypto derivatives venues are putting on regulated exchanges.

Hyperliquid is ranked as the 7th largest decentralized exchange on CoinGecko, with a 3.7% market share and $195 million in daily trading volume.

It ranks as the fourth-largest fee-generating protocol in the crypto industry, generating $15.6 million in weekly fees in the past seven days, DefiLlama data shows.

Top decentralized exchanges by trading volume and market share. Source: CoinGecko

Hyperliquid has been expanding its functionalities and recently launched canonical prediction markets for offchain events, Cointelegraph reported on Tuesday.

The platform’s growing functionalities are positioning Hyperliquid as the crypto industry’s next “super-app,” making the Hyperliquid (HYPE) token “one of the most mispriced assets in crypto today,” as investors are still evaluating it as just a perp DEX, said Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at crypto asset manager Bitwise. 

Magazine: Would Bitcoin really be at $200K if not for Jane Street? Trade Secrets

US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) posted their longest outflow streak since launch, extending withdrawals as institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure weakened.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded another $223 million in net outflows on Thursday, marking the record nine-day outflow streak since the funds launched in 2024, according to data from Farside Investors.

The latest streak surpassed the previous record eight-session outflow run recorded in February 2025, though its roughly $2.84 billion in cumulative withdrawals remains below the $3.2 billion lost during the earlier selloff.

US spot Bitcoin ETF outflows in May 2026 versus February 2025. Source: SoSoValue

The outflows suggest institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure is weakening through the ETF channel, and come as major corporate holders such as Strategy face renewed pressure even as some new altcoin products like Hyperliquid (HYPE) ETFs continue attracting investor interest.

BlackRock’s IBIT leads the outflows at $2 billion

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest US spot Bitcoin ETF by assets, accounted for a massive share of losses during the nine-session outflow streak.

The fund recorded roughly $2.04 billion in cumulative outflows between May 15 and Thursday. As Cointelegraph reported, a $527.8 million withdrawal on May 27 marked IBIT’s second-largest daily outflow on record, narrowly below the $528.3 million record posted on Jan. 30, 2025.

BTC holdings for all US spot Bitcoin ETFs as of market close on Wednesday. Source: Wallet Pilot

Despite the selling pressure, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF remains the dominant US spot Bitcoin fund by assets under management. IBIT held roughly 792,000 BTC as of market close on Wednesday, representing about 62% of all US spot Bitcoin ETF holdings, according to Wallet Pilot data.

HYPE ETFs buck the broader slowdown

While spot Bitcoin ETFs face sustained selling pressure, newly launched HYPE ETFs have continued attracting fresh capital from investors.

The products recorded steady inflows between May 12 and Thursday, with cumulative net inflows rising above $100 million, according to SoSoValue.

Daily flows in US-listed spot HYPE ETFs. Source: SoSoValue

Other altcoin funds such as spot XRP ETFs also recorded steady gains over the period, totaling roughly $120 million in net additions between May 4 and Thursday.

Related: Bitcoin’s major holders halt buys as demand slows: CryptoQuant

The divergence underscores a shift in crypto fund flows, with investors pulling back from Bitcoin and Ether ETFs while newer products tied to tokens such as Hyperliquid’s HYPE continue to attract inflows.

US spot Ether ETFs have also faced persistent selling pressure, logging 13 consecutive days of outflows between May 11 and Thursday, with cumulative losses of roughly $694 million.

Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?

The global rush to deploy autonomous AI agents across the internet, enterprise networks and consumer applications is creating a catastrophic security debt, according to the chief of blockchain security auditor Certik.

While corporations ambitiously market these tools as productivity miracles, the crude reality is that it can be a very, very risky thing to do. Unisolated, unvetted AI agents are a massive security disaster waiting to happen, Ronghui Gu, the co-founder and CEO of CertiK, told CoinDesk.

Gu warned that users are potentially exposing their most sensitive files, local credentials and money accounts to autonomous systems that can be easily manipulated, hijacked and openly scammed.

“Right now, agents are no longer just answering questions in a chat window,” Gu told CoinDesk on the heels of CertiK’s landmark deep-dive report into widespread agent infrastructure. “They are beginning to call external tools, read local files, trigger workflows, and interact with financial infrastructure. But if you do not isolate the execution environment and scan these tools first, you are handing a compromised identity broad internal access to your entire network.”

The fundamental flaw in the current AI agent boom is a mistaken trust model, according to Gu.

Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of Cardano’s Input Output, said that by 2035 they will become more relevant than humans on the internet. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, recently said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”

Ultimate inside threat

Gu said many popular, open-source AI applications are built under the assumption that because they run locally on a user’s computer or connect via standard chat apps like WhatsApp, they are safe from external threats.

The reality is entirely the opposite, he noted. The moment a user grants an AI agent permission to read local system storage, view execution histories or manage personal email and business database credentials, that agent becomes the ultimate inside threat.

CertiK’s recent analysis of early-state, rapidly growing agent structures uncovered a staggering accumulation of security vulnerabilities, including hundreds of critical security advisories, unpatched common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and other massive exposures of local credentials and session memories resulting from completely inconsistent boundary checks.

More alarming yet is how easily these autonomous systems can be completely redirected at the reasoning layer without a single line of malicious code ever being written, Gu emphasized.

Through basic “prompt injection” attacks, a bad actor can embed hidden natural language instructions inside a benign webpage, a PDF document, or an incoming email, he added.

When the unisolated AI agent reads that file to process a task for the user, it fails to separate trusted system commands from the untrusted external data, Gu explained. The agent then silently overwrites its original rules, obeys the malicious instruction, and can be forced to exfiltrate data or trigger unauthorized fund transfers.

Hyperfast exploits

Gu revealed that CertiK discovered hundreds of malicious skills, fake installers, and lookalike dependency packages sitting directly on open agent utility hubs. Because these malicious plug-ins use standard natural language to subtly influence the agent’s behavior and change its goals, they completely bypass legacy, signature-based antivirus software.

“The scam apps use natural language to influence behavior, making them totally resistant to traditional antivirus scans,” Gu explained. “And right now, it is even easier to scam the machine than it is to scam a human.”

In what Gu describes as a bizarre evolution of financial crime, CertiK’s telemetry has observed an explosion of onchain, automated scams that run for only 10 minutes or a few hours before completely vanishing.

These hyperfast, ephemeral exploits are specifically designed by hackers to target and scam other autonomous AI trading bots and automated agent systems, executing machine-on-machine financial drainage before any human even realizes a compromise has occurred.

Gu states that the software engineering industry must completely abandon its reliance on trust-based interactions and move immediately toward an isolated, “Zero Trust” architecture where every command and dependency is continuously verified.

This morning, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) took historic action to permit the listing of a true bitcoin perpetual contract by a CFTC-registered exchange. In doing so, the Commission charted a path for one of the most liquid segments of the crypto asset markets to exist within the U.S. regulatory framework. Having true perpetual contracts in the United States is a major step forward in delivering on President Trump’s goal of cementing America as the crypto capital of the world.

Unlike a traditional futures contract, which was designed for markets that close overnight and on weekends, a perpetual contract (also known as a “perpetual” or “perp”) is a type of derivative contract that has no fixed expiration date. Instead, counterparties periodically exchange a funding rate payment, similar to variation margin, that is designed to maintain relative price parity with the underlying asset’s spot price. In markets that operate 24/7, the lack of an expiration date allows market participants to maintain continuous price exposure without periodic expirations and the associated costs of rolling over contracts.

Perpetual contracts were first theorized in a discussion paper published in 1992 by Nobel-prize-winning economist Robert Shiller. Since then, perpetuals have become a foundational risk-management and price-discovery tool in the global crypto asset markets.

Yet, despite clear market demand and the CFTC’s statutory obligation to promote responsible innovation, the CFTC has – until now – failed to provide a workable pathway for crypto asset perpetuals to exist in a compliant manner in the United States.

As a result, perpetual trading activity has predictably occurred offshore. With liquidity fragmented across foreign platforms, American crypto asset firms were competitively disadvantaged, and U.S. market participants were effectively barred from accessing these markets.

Under my leadership, the CFTC has taken a different approach. One that is consistent with the CFTC’s mandate to promote responsible innovation and fair competition, and one rooted in the belief that responsible innovation requires regulatory clarity.

The Commission’s long-standing, principled oversight of the commodity derivatives market will now include a workable framework for true crypto asset perpetual contracts. This is a framework that can limit excessive leverage, volatility and systemic risk, rather than pushing those risks offshore to unregulated venues.

While today’s approval of the bitcoin perpetual may seem novel, history tells a different story.

For more than a century and a half, America’s commodity futures markets have functioned as a proving ground for innovation and evolved alongside technological progress. From agricultural futures in the nineteenth century, to electronic trading in the twentieth century and bitcoin futures under Trump 1.0, our markets have consistently adapted to new forms of commerce, risk transfer and capital formation. Crypto assets and blockchain-based financial infrastructure represent one of the many next chapters in that story.

In my view, the question was never whether crypto asset perpetual contracts would exist. Instead, the question was whether they would exist under American oversight, American standards and American rule of law.

For too long, bureaucratic regulators approached the new frontier of finance with the assumption that innovation itself represented a threat to the public interest. This decelerationist approach resulted in regulation by enforcement and forced American innovators to flee the U.S. and build beyond our borders.

Fortunately, thanks to the leadership of President Donald Trump, those days are behind us, and the U.S. is now the crypto capital of the world. Today’s action to onshore crypto asset perpetuals was the natural extension of this American achievement and reinforces U.S. leadership in digital financial technology.

Although the work is far from finished, today marks an important milestone.

For the first time, the world’s most sophisticated financial system has opened the door for crypto asset perpetuals to operate within its regulated framework. And while Congress has an important role to play in delivering long-term statutory clarity for crypto asset markets, the CFTC will continue advancing initiatives related to tokenized collateral, crypto asset market structure and prediction markets.

Innovation is coming onshore.

American crypto asset perpetuals are here, and the U.S. will continue to lead in this new frontier of finance.

Latest developments: Klein argued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission faces a dramatically larger mandate as lawmakers consider expanding its authority over digital assets. Klein recently joined Rebecca Rettig and Renato Mariotti on CoinDesk’s The Policy Protocol.

• Klein said the CFTC was originally created to oversee commodity futures markets and was not built for the scale of responsibilities envisioned under current crypto legislation.
• He warned that giving the agency new powers without additional staff, funding and expertise could create the appearance of regulation without meaningful oversight.
• Klein expressed concern that regulatory capacity has been weakened by personnel departures and structural changes at the agency.

What this means: The debate over the Clarity Act is increasingly becoming a debate over whether the CFTC can effectively police crypto markets.

• Klein said one lesson from the Dodd-Frank era is that assigning major responsibilities across multiple regulators can create delays and confusion.
• He argued that fragmented oversight risks repeating past regulatory failures if agencies lack the resources or will to enforce rules.
• Klein compared those risks to shortcomings he believes contributed to past financial crises.

The controversy: Klein sharply criticized allegations that political influence is affecting financial regulation.

• Referring to a New York Times report discussed during the interview, Klein said regulators should remain independent from political intervention.
• He argued that enforcement decisions should not be influenced by relationships with the White House or political figures.
• Klein described the current environment as unusually permissive toward financial misconduct and called for stronger accountability.

Reading between the lines: Klein sees a longer-term solution in closer coordination between U.S. market regulators.

• He said the U.S. is unusual in maintaining separate capital markets regulators through the SEC and CFTC.
• Klein argued that eventually merging the agencies would make sense, though he expressed skepticism that Congress is prepared to pursue that path.
• In the meantime, he praised reports that SEC and CFTC staff may share office space, saying physical proximity can improve collaboration more than formal agreements.

What comes next: Regulatory structure could become as important as the rules themselves.

• Klein said memorandums of understanding between agencies often fail to produce meaningful cooperation in practice.
• He argued that stronger coordination mechanisms and operational integration would better prepare regulators for overseeing crypto and prediction markets.