TLDR:

• Fed held rates at 3.50–3.75%, cutting expected 2026 reductions from four down to one.
  
• Oil surging to $115 per barrel during the Iran conflict pushed short-term inflation further from the 2% target.
  
• A ceasefire sent oil below $95 within hours, raising hopes that the one remaining rate cut could arrive sooner.
  
• Kevin Warsh, known for favoring lower rates, replaces Jerome Powell in May, adding a new variable to Fed policy.

Fed rate cuts have become a closely watched topic as Middle East tensions reshape the economic outlook for 2026.

The Federal Reserve held rates unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75% at its latest policy meeting. Markets had previously anticipated four reductions this year.

Escalating conflict in the region, however, has brought that number down to just one. Oil prices surged to $115 per barrel at the height of the Iran conflict, worsening an already stubborn inflation reading of 3.0%. A fragile ceasefire has since changed the near-term picture, though uncertainty persists.

Oil Shock or Structural Problem? The Fed Weighs In

The decision to hold rates was not unanimous inside the Federal Reserve. Two members pushed for a cut but were outvoted by the majority. Most policymakers preferred waiting for clearer data before adjusting the rate path.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell addressed the oil price situation directly in the meeting minutes. He acknowledged that Middle East tensions are pushing short-term inflation numbers higher.

At the same time, he stressed that long-term inflation expectations have remained relatively stable. The Fed is treating the current situation as a temporary oil shock, not a structural inflation problem.

Market analyst account Bull Theory captured the shift on X, writing, “The Iran war just killed four Fed rate cuts” — with only one cut now remaining on the table for 2026.

That distinction between short-term and long-term inflation matters for markets and policymakers alike. Oil-driven inflation typically reverses once prices stabilize. The Fed’s current framework leaves room for cuts once that reversal shows up clearly in the data.

Ceasefire, Falling Oil, and a Change at the Top

The ceasefire announcement triggered a sharp drop in oil prices, from $115 to below $95 within hours. That move represents a meaningful shift in the near-term inflation outlook. Markets responded quickly by reassessing rate cut probabilities for the remainder of 2026.

April and May oil price trends will be the key numbers to watch going forward. If prices hold below $95, inflation could begin trending closer to the Fed’s 2% target. That outcome would likely pull the one remaining rate cut forward from late 2026 into an earlier window.

Another variable entering the equation is the scheduled change in Fed leadership. Powell steps down in May, with Kevin Warsh set to take over as chair.

Warsh is widely known to favor lower interest rates, a stance that could accelerate any easing if inflation data cooperates.

That said, the ceasefire is a two-week arrangement, not a permanent agreement. Iran has already declared three violations since the deal was announced.

Israel continues military operations in Lebanon, and the Strait of Hormuz remains partially restricted. The April Consumer Price Index report will serve as the first real test of whether the oil shock is easing.

Until that data arrives, Fed rate cuts in 2026 will remain unsettled.

TLDR:

• Muse Spark is Meta’s first multimodal reasoning model supporting tool use, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent tasks.
  
• Meta collaborated with over 1,000 physicians to strengthen Muse Spark’s health reasoning and medical response accuracy.
  
• Contemplating mode runs parallel AI agents, scoring 58% on Humanity’s Last Exam to rival top frontier AI models.
  
• Muse Spark uses ten times less compute than Llama 4 Maverick while delivering comparable performance across key benchmarks.

Muse Spark, Meta’s newest AI model, marks a major step in the company’s push toward personal superintelligence.

Developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the model supports multimodal reasoning, tool use, and multi-agent orchestration.

It is now available at meta.ai and the Meta AI app. A private API preview is open to select partners. Meta also plans to open-source future versions of the model, widening access to its growing AI ecosystem.

Multimodal Reasoning and Health Applications Define Muse Spark’s Early Rollout

Muse Spark is built from the ground up to process visual information across multiple domains and tools. It performs well on visual STEM questions, entity recognition, and localization tasks.

These abilities enable interactive experiences, from troubleshooting home appliances to building custom minigames. Meta positions this as a foundational part of its personal superintelligence roadmap.

AI at Meta confirmed on X: “Muse Spark is a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration.”

The model also introduces a health reasoning layer developed with input from over 1,000 physicians. Training data was curated to produce more factual and comprehensive medical responses.

Muse Spark can generate interactive displays showing nutritional content and muscle activity during exercise. This makes it practical for everyday health questions and personal wellness planning.

Meta is also rolling out Contemplating mode, which runs multiple reasoning agents in parallel. This mode allows Muse Spark to compete with models like Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro.

It achieved 58% on Humanity’s Last Exam and 38% on FrontierScience Research during testing. The feature is rolling out gradually to users on meta.ai.

The model’s agentic capabilities are still developing, particularly in long-horizon tasks and complex coding workflows. Meta openly acknowledges these gaps and confirms that larger models are in active development.

Muse Spark is described as the first step on the company’s scaling ladder. Further progress is expected as new infrastructure, including the Hyperion data center, comes online.

Scaling Research and Safety Evaluations Back Meta’s Confidence in Muse Spark

Meta rebuilt its pretraining stack over nine months, improving model architecture, optimization, and data curation. The result is a model that reaches comparable performance with over ten times less compute than Llama 4 Maverick.

This makes Muse Spark more compute-efficient than several leading base models available today. Scaling laws applied to smaller models were used to verify these gains.

Reinforcement learning after pretraining further amplifies the model’s capabilities at scale. Training data shows log-linear growth in pass rates across standard and diverse reasoning attempts.

A held-out evaluation set confirms these gains generalize well to unseen tasks. Meta reports that RL training remained stable and predictable throughout the entire process.

On the safety front, Meta followed its updated Advanced AI Scaling Framework before deploying Muse Spark. Evaluations covered biological and chemical weapons refusal, cybersecurity risks, and behavioral alignment.

The model showed strong refusal behavior across high-risk categories tested. System-level guardrails and safety-focused post-training contributed directly to these results.

Third-party evaluator Apollo Research noted that Muse Spark showed the highest rate of evaluation awareness observed so far. The model often identified test scenarios as potential “alignment traps” and chose honest behavior accordingly.

Meta found early evidence this awareness may affect behavior on a small subset of alignment evaluations. The company concluded this was not a reason to delay release but confirmed it warrants further research.

Anthropic has built an AI model that can autonomously find and exploit zero-day software vulnerabilities at a level the company says surpasses decades of human security research and every automated tool in existence.

A closer look at its prowess suggests potential threats to crypto DeFi infrastructure. Let’s start by discussing its capability.

Cracks long-hidden vulnerabilities

Like finding a needle in a million haystacks, the model, Claude Mythos Preview, has a knack for uncovering software bugs that have long eluded human experts.

It found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system built specifically to be hard to hack, for under $50 in compute.

It found a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg, the video software that powers most of the internet’s streaming infrastructure, that had been scanned five million times by automated security tools without anyone catching it.

It even wrote a browser exploit that chained four separate vulnerabilities together to break through two layers of security. And it took a publicly known Linux vulnerability and turned it into a full working attack in under a day for under $2,000, a job that would normally take a skilled human researcher weeks.

This has raised alarm bells in tech industry, and rightfully so, as Mythos already exists, is operational, and is uncovering vulnerabilities in code protecting user funds that no human or tool has found in 27 years. This stands in stark contrast to recent fears about quantum computing risks to Bitcoin, which remain largely theoretical.

Why should crypto developers care

The findings that matter most for crypto are in Anthropic’s technical blog, which says Mythos found security flaws in what the company calls ‘the world’s most popular cryptography libraries,’ including TLS, AES-GCM, and SSH. These are critical for internet security, securing HTTPS connections, encrypting data, and allowing developers to remotely access servers that support DeFi and exchange infrastructure.

Flaws or bugs in these could let someone forge certificates or decrypt private communications.

The risk is particularly high for DeFi protocols, which are open source software. Their code is publicly readable by anyone, including a model like Mythos that can autonomously catalog every weakness in a codebase at machine speed for near-zero marginal cost.

And while the roughly $200 billion locked in smart contracts across Ethereum, Solana, and other chains has been audited by humans and automated scanners, Anthropic claims Mythos operates beyond both.

The company noted that “mitigations whose security value comes primarily from friction rather than hard barriers may become considerably weaker against model-assisted adversaries.”

Multisig governance, which requires multiple people to approve a blockchain transaction, timelocks, which delay a transaction for a set period, and audit reports as proof of security are all friction-based defenses. In simple terms, it means that these measures slow things rather than blocking an attack at the code level.

So far, it hasn’t rattled market valuations. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index has gained 7% in 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin and ether, as the temporary ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has bolstered risk sentiment. But looking ahead, traders may want to keep an eye not just on macroeconomic factors, but also on developments around Mythos, given its potential implications for software and blockchain security.

All things said, the Mythos model will not be released to the general public yet, and is instead shared with a select bunch of 40 software giants, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, under ‘Project Glasswing.’

A consortium of six major Swiss banks joined forces with Swiss Stablecoin AG to test use cases for a Swiss franc-pegged stablecoin, the country’s largest bank UBS announced Wednesday.

UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank and BCV, alongside Swiss Stablecoin AG set up a sandbox in a coordinated push to bring blockchain-based payments into Switzerland’s financial system, the statement added.

The group will run the stablecoin trial period through 2026, allowing banks and other institutions to test transactions in a live but controlled setting.

The Swiss franc-pegged stablecoin project is designed to allow participants to simulate real payment flows with limits on users and transaction volumes to manage risk.

Switzerland does not yet have a regulated Swiss franc stablecoin with broad use. The banks aim to test how such a token could support payments, improve settlement speed and connect blockchain-based applications with traditional money.

The project will focus testing payment processes and exploring how programmable money could support financial services.

The stablecoin testing period will remain open to other banks, companies and institutions, the statement noted. The group aims to gather operational experience and assess whether a full market debut of a CHF stablecoin can follow.

The Swiss stablecoin testing period follows a consortium of 12 top banks including BBVA, ING, and UniCredit teaming up to back Qivalis, a digital euro that will debut in the second half of 2026, with the primary purpose of becoming the European alternative to dominant dollar stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.

The crypto market is back on the front-foot after a two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran removed some of the geopolitical uncertainty and sent oil prices tumbling. Still, energy market dynamics are such that it may be too early to assume the return of animal spirits to risk assets.

Bitcoin BTC$71,599.54 has jumped 3% to $71,600 in the past 24 hours while ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), and solana (SOL) have all gained more than 5%. The CoinDesk 20 Index has outperformed bitcoin, rising 4.2 percent, which is typical when altcoins outpace the market leader.

Oil has plunged after Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global shipments. WTI crude futures trading on NYMEX are down nearly 16 percent to $95 a barrel. When crude drops sharply, inflation fears ease, Fed rate hike calls weaken and crypto tends to rally.

Supporting the move is a drop in bitcoin and ether 30-day implied volatility, which measures market fear. Since the debut of spot ETFs two years ago, these numbers have evolved into VIX-like metrics, spiking during sell-offs and calming as panic fades.

The mood could get another lift later if Morgan Stanley’s bitcoin ETF debuts with strong volumes and inflows on day one. That would reinforce the story of institutional adoption.

“The recent pattern has been institutional demand showing up again through ETFs. When inflows are present, dips are bought faster and the market holds higher levels even when momentum cools,” Marex said.

Still, there are reasons to be cautious. The overnight rally was partly fueled by short positions being unwound after traders betting on a U.S.-Iran escalation got caught off guard. Shorts worth $431 million were liquidated in 24 hours, the largest since March 4, according to Coinglass. In cases like this, the market often chugs along waiting for fresh demand. Without it, gains can quickly reverse.

While oil is down to $85, it’s still $30 higher than before the conflict started on Feb. 28. Moreover, the ceasefire is temporary and not a permanent fix and for oil to drop further, hormuz tanker traffic and insurance rates need to normalize to pre-war levels.

“This remains a pause rather than a durable settlement, with the ceasefire conditional on how Iran manages passage through Hormuz over the coming weeks,” QCP Capital said. “That caution matters because the physical damage narrative has not gone away.”

Until then, oil could stay near $100 and keep risk assets like crypto in check. Stay alert.

What’s trending

Read more: For a comprehensive list of events that would be shaping up this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead“.

Today’s signal

The chart shows bitcoin’s daily price swings in candlestick format since October. The yellow line represents the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) of the price, and the white line shows the 100-day average.

As shown, the spot price has decisively moved above the 50-day average, a widely watched measure of near-term trends. The move indicates a strengthening of bullish momentum and follows the recent bounce from the trendline support at the February lows.

Prices, therefore, could see more upside ahead, with $76,100, the 100-day average, as the next level to watch. On the downside, the late March lows near $65,000 are expected to act as a demand zone, supporting pullbacks. If that level fails, prices could fall to $60,000.

Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today

Payment stablecoin issuers in the United States will be required to implement a regime targeting illicit finance under the proposed framework for the GENIUS Act.

In a Wednesday notice, the US Treasury Department said its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had issued a joint proposed rule to implement provisions of the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025. 

The proposal would direct payment stablecoin issuers to establish and maintain an anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) program, maintain a sanctions compliance program, and have the ability to “block, freeze and reject” certain stablecoin transactions. Issuers would be treated as financial institutions for purposes of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).

“Bringing stablecoin issuers into full BSA/OFAC compliance effectively turns them into bank-like gatekeepers,” Snir Levi, CEO of blockchain intelligence firm Nominis, told Cointelegraph. “That means significantly more wallet freezes, transaction blocking and asset seizures at scale,” he said.

Treasury’s notice was part of the implementation of the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin payments bill signed into law by US President Donald Trump last year. The legislation provides a framework for stablecoin issuers and is expected to be a boon for crypto markets. It will be effective 18 months after it was signed in July or 120 days after federal authorities issue related regulations.

Related: NYT revives Adam Back theory in latest bid to identify Bitcoin creator

On Tuesday, the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued its own proposed rule as part of the agency’s GENIUS Act implementation. The FDIC said stablecoin holders would not be insured under the bill, though reserve deposits for issuers would receive protection.

Stablecoin yield fight rages between US lawmakers and banking and crypto industries

While federal agencies work on implementation of the GENIUS Act, Congress has effectively been stalled on progress for a bill to establish a digital asset market framework, called the CLARITY Act when it passed the House of Representatives last year.

With the Senate Banking Committee yet to schedule a markup on the bill — a necessary step before a full floor vote in the chamber — crypto and banking representatives have been meeting with White House officials to discuss issues related to stablecoin yield, tokenized equities and ethics.

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers said on Wednesday that a ban on stablecoin yield in the bill “would do very little to protect bank lending,” claiming that it would impose costs on users.

As of Wednesday, the banking committee had not rescheduled a markup on the CLARITY Act.

Magazine: Your guide to surviving this mini-crypto winter