Oil futures surged on Hyperliquid after President Donald Trump ordered a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a major global supply chokepoint. The move came after Iran refused to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad earlier in the day.

Perpetual futures tied to WTI crude oil jumped to $96.40, up 7% on the day, extending early gains. Brent futures rose 6% to $96.

Notably, WTI futures registered $1.53 billion in trading volume, making it the third-most-traded instrument on the platform behind BTC and ETH. The data highlights growing investor preference for price discovery on decentralized blockchain platforms, especially when traditional markets are closed.

This blockade news couldn’t have come at a worse time, as mid-April marks a critical period for the oil market, when the large-scale drawdown of strategic petroleum reserves coordinated by the International Energy Agency begins to approach its limit.

Those emergency releases, initiated after the war broke out on Feb. 28, have been offsetting a supply shortfall of roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels per day caused by disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz, but as these buffers run down in the coming weeks, that gap risks widening sharply to roughly 10 to 11 million barrels per day if normal supply is not restored.

If this scenario materializes, it would amount to “a supply shock without precedent in the modern oil market,” the House of Saud recently said. The IEA’s Chief, Fatih Birol, warned last week that the oil supply shock could be worse in April than in March.

The impact on markets would likely be immediate, with oil benchmarks gapping higher on Monday amid tighter supply expectations, equities facing renewed risk-off pressure amid inflation concerns, and volatility rising across both traditional and crypto markets as traders reassess global growth assumptions.

Bitcoin, which is considered a leading indicator for risk assets by some traders, is already under pressure. As of writing, it changed hands near $71,000, down nearly 3% on the day, according to CoinDesk data.

Crypto prices are under further pressure during U.S. morning hours on Sunday after President Trump announced a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy … will begin the process of blockading any and all ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” said the president in a social media post.

The president’s move came hours after Vice President J.D. Vance late Saturday announced that U.S. and Iranian negotiators had failed to agree to an extended ceasefire after long weekend meetings in Pakistan.

Trading above $73,000 for most of Saturday, bitcoin quickly pulled back to the $71,500 area following the Vance comments. In the minutes since President Trump announced the blockade, BTC has slid further to $70,900, now lower by 2.5% over the past 24 hours.

The largest traders have a problem: how to keep their activity quiet enough to not influence market prices or reveal any long-term strategies.

In traditional markets like equities, they’ve had that ability for decades through so-called dark pools and off-exchange venues. Even as far back as January 2025, more than half of all U.S. equities trading took place off public exchanges, according to Bloomberg data.

Crypto has never had an equivalent, and the absence is increasingly difficult to ignore. Every trade on Hyperliquid, every order on a decentralized exchange, is visible to anyone paying attention, and companies like DeFiLlama and Arkham exist to collect and present that data in a digestible way.

The crypto market, which prides itself on disrupting traditional finance, has replicated one of TradFi’s most persistent structural problems: If you’re big enough to move markets, everyone can see you coming. As a result, firms providing liquidity on public decentralized exchanges say their strategies get reverse-engineered quickly

“On Hyperliquid, one of the top market makers told us they have to rotate their trading strategies every three weeks because they get copied,” Denis Dariotis, co-founder of GoQuant, a crypto trading infrastructure firm backed by GSR, said in an interview. “That’s the alpha problem.”

There are other consequences, too. Market makers — the firms providing the liquidity that keeps crypto markets functioning — operate in full public view, and the industry has developed a habit of making them the villain whenever something goes wrong. Recent scrutiny of Jane Street‘s involvement in the Terra/Luna collapse is only the latest example. A large firm’s onchain activity gets traced, a narrative forms and the company spends weeks managing a PR crisis over trades that, on a traditional venue, would have been entirely unremarkable.

GoQuant’s answer is GoDark, a decentralized exchange (DEX) set to start up on Solana in May. That platform uses zero-knowledge proofs to conceal trade details not just from other market participants, but also from the node operators running the order book. The ambition is radical: a matching engine where nobody in the system can see what they’re matching.

The immediate question is whether that’s technically achievable at any useful speed. Zero-knowledge proofs are computationally expensive, and the architecture adds latency that privacy-agnostic systems don’t have to absorb. Internal testing puts order matching at 25 to 50 milliseconds — Dariotis frames this as fast relative to most decentralized exchanges, where execution often runs into the hundreds of milliseconds, and he’s right. But it’s also an order of magnitude slower than what’s available to firms co-located with a centralized exchange. For retail traders that gap probably doesn’t matter. For the market makers GoDark is banking on to provide liquidity, it might.

Which brings up the harder problem. A private exchange with no volume is just a dark room. GoDark’s plan to seed liquidity mirrors what Hyperliquid did with its HLP vault — users deposit funds, the funds get deployed as market-making liquidity, participants take a cut of fees and first access to liquidations.

It worked for Hyperliquid. But it has not worked for most of the DEXes that have tried to replicate the model since, which have generally seen volume collapse once the incentive period ends.

Then there is the regulatory question, which the team has so far avoided having to answer directly. Traditional dark pools are private in the narrow sense that they conceal pre-trade order information, but they operate under post-trade reporting requirements and regulatory oversight.

GoDark’s privacy is more absolute by design, it’s structurally incapable of producing a full audit trail. The inclusion of automated OFAC screening is a gesture toward compliance, but it is unlikely to satisfy regulators who have spent the past three years pushing crypto toward more transparency, not less. How that tension resolves — and whether it limits institutional participation to jurisdictions with lighter oversight — remains to be seen.

GoDark is separate from GoQuant’s existing institutional product of the same name, a spot DEX built with Copper and GSR that enters production next month and targets a different, narrower client base. The May launch is the retail-facing version.

Banks and corporates across Europe are moving beyond exploration and are now actively selecting infrastructure partners to support stablecoin adoption, according to Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner at crypto custody technology provider Taurus.

Brahimi told Cointelegraph that eighteen months ago, most conversations were still educational, focused on understanding stablecoins and their risks. Today, firms with board-level approval are preparing to go live. He said the introduction of Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) has accelerated that transition by replacing fragmented national rules with a single regulatory regime.

“In the past twelve months alone some of Europe’s most stringent financial institutions are all arriving at the same conclusion, digital assets, including stablecoins, belong inside the existing banking stack, not beside it,” he said.

Corporate treasury teams are driving much of the demand. Initially focused on payments and settlement, companies are looking to use stablecoins to move funds faster, reduce costs and operate outside traditional banking hours, Brahimi said.

Related: Bank of France calls for tougher MiCA limits on stablecoin payments

Demand drives stablecoin adoption in Europe

Brahimi said adoption is increasingly driven by practical needs rather than long-term strategy. “Once clients start asking for better settlement, more flexibility, or more efficient cross-border movement of value, the conversation becomes much more immediate and much more practical,” he added.

On Thursday, ClearBank Europe announced that it has become the first Dutch credit institution to secure approval under MiCA to operate as a crypto asset service provider. A consortium of major European banks, including ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank and BBVA, is also developing Qivalis, a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin initiative designed to enable regulated onchain payments and settlement across Europe.

European banks are also moving ahead with stablecoin initiatives. Societe Generale has positioned its stablecoins around cross-border payments, onchain settlement, FX and cash management, while Oddo BHF has launched a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin. Meanwhile, a consortium of banks, including ING, UniCredit and BNP Paribas is preparing a Swiss-franc stablecoin for the second half of 2026.

Konstantin Vasilenko, co-founder and chief business development officer at Paybis, said the platform has seen rising demand for compatible stablecoins in Europe. Between October 2025 and March 2026, USDC (USDC) volume on Paybis in the EU climbed about 109%, while its share of total stablecoin activity increased from roughly 13% to 32%.

Vasilenko added that in the EU, Paybis stablecoin buy volume remained roughly five to six times higher than sell volume between October 2025 and March 2026. He also noted that average stablecoin transaction sizes were about 15% to 35% larger than typical Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH) trades. “That usually points to working capital, settlement use and more deliberate business flows,” he said.

Related: Hong Kong grants first stablecoin licenses to Anchorpoint and HSBC

Stablecoin volumes could reach $1.5 quadrillion by 2035

A new report from Chainalysis projects that stablecoin transaction volumes could grow dramatically over the next decade, reaching as high as $719 trillion by 2035 under organic growth scenarios, up from about $28 trillion in 2025.

In a more aggressive scenario, volumes could climb to $1.5 quadrillion if stablecoins become a dominant payment infrastructure and wealth transfer from baby boomers to younger, more crypto-native generations accelerates adoption.

Will Harborne, CEO of stablecoin infrastructure provider Rhino.fi, said that stablecoins will become increasingly important for corporate treasury, cross-border settlement, and FX between euro and dollar stablecoins over the next few years.

“I think every business will eventually start accepting and using stablecoins in some form, and the companies that prepare early will be in the best position when that shift becomes mainstream,” he said.

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