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European Energy Crisis: How Russia and Qatar Shocks Are Threatening EU Industrial Power

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Nexo Partners with Bakkt for US Crypto Exchange and Yield Programs

TLDR:

  • Europe still imported 2 billion cubic feet per day of Russian LNG last year, half of Russia’s total exports.
  • Qatar supplies 20% of global LNG and declared force majeure, with production halted for at least one month.
  • The U.S. now controls over 50% of Europe’s LNG supply, giving Washington direct leverage over EU energy costs.
  • Gas prices have already surged over 50% as simultaneous supply shocks strain Europe’s limited energy alternatives.

European energy crisis pressures are mounting as Russia redirects LNG exports while Qatar declares force majeure on gas. Europe replaced cheap Russian pipeline gas with costly LNG after the Ukraine war began.

Now two simultaneous supply shocks are hitting the continent at once. Gas prices have already surged over 50% in recent days.

The EU faces limited alternatives and growing concerns about a 2022-style energy crunch that could once again disrupt factories across the region.

Russia Redirects Exports as Qatar Shuts Down Production

Before the Ukraine war, Europe relied on 15 billion cubic feet per day of Russian gas. That supply kept European manufacturing costs competitive for years.

After the conflict began, Europe sourced costlier LNG from the U.S., Qatar, and other producers. The transition raised energy costs for European industry considerably.

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The EU still imported 2 billion cubic feet per day of Russian LNG last year. That volume is roughly half of Russia’s total LNG exports globally. Russia has now announced it will redirect those flows to China and India.

Bull Theory stated on X: “Russia announced it will redirect part of its LNG exports away from Europe to friendly countries like China and India immediately.”

Russia’s move comes before the EU’s 2027 legal ban on Russian gas takes effect. Moscow has clear incentive to act on supply leverage before that deadline.

European policymakers now face a difficult position with limited response time. New supply chains cannot be established quickly enough to fill the gap.

Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility shutdown has added another blow to Europe’s energy position. Qatar supplies 20% of all global LNG and declared force majeure after the closure.

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Normal production is not expected to resume for at least one month. Europe had relied on Qatari LNG as a central part of its post-Russia supply plan.

U.S. Leverage Grows While European Industry Faces Closures

The United States now supplies over 50% of Europe’s LNG. This gives Washington leverage over European energy costs and industrial policy.

European manufacturers must either absorb higher costs or relocate operations to North America. Bull Theory noted: “This effectively allows the U.S. to weaponize energy costs, forcing European factories to either pay a massive premium or relocate.”

Unlike China and India, Europe has not built diverse energy supply chains. Both nations secured alternatives that shielded them from current disruptions.

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Europe, by contrast, faces simultaneous shocks with very few substitutes. Brussels is caught between U.S. bargaining pressure and a supply gap that diplomacy cannot quickly fill.

If the Hormuz blockade continues for weeks, a second wave of factory closures becomes likely. A similar pattern to 2022 could emerge, with permanent industrial losses for the European energy crisis.

The EU’s manufacturing standing faces direct structural pressure as a result. The outcome depends on events largely outside Europe’s control.

Russia still earns billions from the EU despite current tensions. The coming 2027 ban removes Moscow’s incentive to keep flows stable.

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Europe has few tools to address a supply failure of this scale. The energy challenge now extends well beyond what Brussels can manage alone.

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0G Retrains 107B Model in Public as Decentralized AI Enters a New Phase

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with little attention.

0G says it crossed an important threshold months ago. Now it is retraining the same model in public, with the goal of showing what decentralized AI can actually deliver and why its earlier result deserved more attention.

In July 2025, 0G trained a 107 billion parameter model called DiLoCoX-107B with China Mobile. The research later appeared on arXiv after peer review. According to the paper, the system reached 357 times better communication efficiency than traditional AllReduce methods. Even so, the result barely landed in the market.

The team says the timing worked against it. Mid-2025 crypto attention was fixed on mainnet launches and token stories, while technical results drew far less interest. The work was serious, but it did not get much traction outside a small circle following the field closely.

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Now, with decentralized AI back in focus, 0G wants to bring the result back into view.

A public retraining effort

This time, the company is putting the retraining process out in the open.

0G plans to document each stage, including checkpoints, convergence metrics, and data sourcing. It also says the run will be verified through Trusted Execution Environments using zerogAuth. Once the work is complete, the model weights will be open sourced.

Ultimately, 0G wants to show that decentralized AI can be audited, reproduced, and verified in a way most closed systems cannot match.

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More than a parameter race

A lot of AI coverage still revolves around parameter counts. Bigger numbers attract attention, but 0G argues that a model’s value comes from the full system around it.

For the team, the real test starts with training and continues through verification, storage, serving, and integration into working products.

One of the main technical points is communication efficiency. DiLoCoX uses pipeline parallelism, a dual optimizer policy for local and global updates, a one-step delay overlap mechanism, and adaptive gradient compression. In plain terms, the design cuts the amount of communication needed during distributed training, which is often where these systems slow down.

0G also puts the model inside a full stack that includes onchain verification, decentralized storage, data availability, inference, and settlement. The result is a working environment rather than a one-off research demo.

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Verification is another part of the pitch. With Trusted Execution Environments, users can check more than the existence of a model. They can inspect how it was trained and what data went into the process. For decentralized AI, that changes the trust model in a meaningful way.

The real story is bandwidth

According to 0G, the most important part of the DiLoCoX-107B result was the way the model was trained.

The team says the 107B model ran on standard one gigabit per second internet connections rather than specialized data center setups. That point goes straight at one of the biggest assumptions in AI, namely that frontier training requires rare and expensive networking conditions.

If that holds up over time, the impact could be substantial. Lower technical requirements open the door to far more participants, from research groups to companies and public institutions. In that setup, coordination becomes the main challenge, and decentralized systems are built for exactly that kind of problem.

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A different cost model

0G also says its system cuts costs by about 95% compared with centralized alternatives.

The company attributes that reduction to the removal of expensive centralized overhead rather than cheaper hardware. If those numbers hold in real-world use, advanced model training becomes accessible to far more organizations, including universities, enterprises, and governments that do not have the budget for hyperscale AI spending.

That could change who gets to build serious models in the first place.

Can decentralized AI compete?

Skeptics have long argued that decentralized AI cannot keep up on performance. 0G believes the old tradeoff is starting to weaken.

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As results improve and costs fall, the discussion becomes less about ideology and more about output. Can the system train strong models, verify them, and do it at a price point more teams can afford?

Open participation still comes with real risk. Distributed training can expose systems to data poisoning, gradient manipulation, and uneven contributor quality. 0G says it addresses those issues with architectural safeguards, anomaly detection, and cryptographic verification.

The point is not perfect safety. The point is making failures visible and traceable.

What verifiable AI actually means

For 0G, verifiable AI is about replacing trust by reputation with trust by inspection.

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Instead of taking a provider at its word, users get a way to independently check how a model was trained and how it operates. That idea has obvious value in areas where accountability carries real weight, including finance, healthcare, and government.

This is where decentralized AI starts to stand apart, with systems people can inspect rather than simply trust.

From research demo to working system

The decentralized AI field has come a long way in a short time. Early proof-of-concept work is giving way to systems designed for training, verification, storage, inference, and economic settlement inside one environment.

0G wants DiLoCoX-107B to stand as proof of that progression. The public retraining effort is as much about process as performance. The company is trying to show that decentralized AI can produce serious models while staying open to inspection.

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The road ahead

Larger models are still on the horizon. 0G believes models in the hundreds of billions, and eventually trillions, are within reach.

The next stage depends less on a single scientific leap and more on better coordination and stronger network participation. In decentralized AI, organization may prove just as important as compute.

The retraining of DiLoCoX-107B is an attempt to reopen a conversation 0G believes the market missed the first time. It is also a test of whether open, verifiable AI can win attention on the strength of results rather than hype.

For now, the company is betting that public retraining, transparent documentation, and open access will give decentralized AI a stronger footing in the next round of competition.

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$765 Million ETH Changes Hands As Whales Anchor Ethereum Price Above $2,000

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Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $2,068, pressing directly against the 0.236 Fibonacci level at $2,055. The token has been pulled in two directions simultaneously — long-term holders booking profits from elevated cost bases while whale-tier addresses absorb that supply to prevent a structural breakdown.

The $2,000 level is the line separating these two forces. Which cohort wins determines the next significant move.

Old ETH Holders Are Selling

The Glassnode HODL Waves chart tracking the 3-to-5 year holding cohort spans December 26, 2025, through March 26, 2026. That band held relatively stable between 14.2% and 14.4% of total ETH supply from late December through January 20 before beginning a gradual decline.

The decline accelerated sharply at the right edge of the chart. Between March 21 and March 26, the 3-to-5 year cohort dropped from approximately 13.6% to 12.8% of supply — a fall of nearly 0.8 % in under a week. This represents the second-largest distribution event from this cohort visible in the 2026 data, behind only the drop recorded in late January.

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Ethereum HODL Waves
Ethereum HODL Waves. Source: Glassnode

Holders in this cohort acquired ETH between 2021 and 2023, a period that includes both the 2021 bull market peak near $5,000 and the 2022 bear market lows. Many of those who bought near the top are still underwater.

Those who accumulated during the bear market are now sitting on meaningful profits at current prices and are choosing to realize them. Their exit is not panic — it is deliberate profit-taking at a price level they may not see again soon.

Whales Are Absorbing Smaller Holders Are Selling

The Santiment address supply distribution chart tracking three cohorts — addresses holding 10,000 to 100,000 ETH (blue), 100,000 to 1,000,000 ETH (red), and 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 ETH (yellow) — shows a clear shift in supply ownership since March 25.

The blue cohort sold approximately 370,000 ETH between March 25 and the time of writing. That selling did not push the price lower in any meaningful way. 

Want more token insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Crypto Newsletter here.

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Ethereum Whale Holding
Ethereum Whale Holding. Source: Santiment

Instead, the red and yellow cohorts absorbed that supply collectively, with the two larger whale tiers increasing their balances in direct proportion to the blue cohort’s exit. At the current Ethereum price, that transfer of 370,000 ETH represents approximately $765 million changing hands from mid-tier holders into the largest whale addresses on the network.

This dynamic — larger addresses absorbing supply that smaller addresses are offloading — is what will likely keep ETH above $2,000. As long as that buying continues to absorb available sell-side supply, it acts as a structural floor against further price decline.

ETH Price Trajectory Going Forward

The daily chart shows Ethereum price at $2,068, sitting at the 0.236 Fibonacci level at $2,055, with the red 50-day EMA sloping downward at $2,186 acting as immediate resistance. The Fibonacci retracement grid runs from the zero level at $1,750 to the 1.0 level at $3,045.

The 0.236 level at $2,055 has been the battleground since early March. Every session that has tested it has either closed above or produced a recovery. Ethereum price is currently pressing it again, and the outcome of this test determines the next destination. Below $2,055, the $1,928 horizontal support is the next level on the chart and represents the last defense before the $1,838 floor comes into play.

ETH Price Analysis
ETH Price Analysis. Source: TradingView

The bullish invalidation requires reclaiming the 0.382 level at $2,244. Above that, the 0.5 level at $2,397 becomes the next target, followed by the 0.618 level at $2,550.

A sustained move toward $2,550 would require whale accumulation to accelerate as the 3-to-5-year holder selling pressure subsides. This is a scenario that becomes more likely only if the broader market stabilizes above $2,000.

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California Governor Signs Ban on Prediction Market Insider Trading

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Crypto Breaking News

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Friday expanding restrictions on insider trading linked to prediction markets. The move targets gubernatorial appointees and those closely connected to them, prohibiting the use of confidential or non-public information gained through official duties to profit from markets tied to political or economic events they can influence or which they are privy to. The measure also extends to spouses, family members, and former business partners of the appointed officials.

Newsom’s office framed the order as a guardrail against conflicts of interest and cronyism, with the governor stating that public service should not become a vehicle for personal enrichment. “Public service should not be a get-rich-quick scheme,” Newsom said, underscoring a broader push for stronger ethics standards in state governance. The administration contends that officials must adhere to a clear boundary between their duties and financial bets tied to real-world events they might shape.

“If you serve the public as a political appointee, you serve the public — period. We’re not going to tolerate this kind of corruption in California,” Newsom asserted, characterizing the new rules as a bright line against insider profiteering.

According to the governor’s office, the executive order lists several episodes that allegedly involved political insiders using non-public information to profit from prediction markets. Among the cited cases are six individuals suspected of exploiting information related to U.S. military actions in Iran. The document also points to a January incident in which a Polymarket trader earned about $410,000 betting on the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan president.

Prediction markets have long drawn scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers who fear that insiders may unfairly capitalize on privileged information and that wagers on sensitive developments—such as war or major political changes—could raise national-security concerns. The California order aligns with a broader national conversation about the governance of prediction markets and the potential for conflicts of interest to distort outcomes or undermine public trust.

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Key takeaways

  • The executive order expands insider-trading prohibitions to gubernatorial appointees and their close associates, extending protections to spouses, family members, and former business partners.
  • The scope centers on non-public information gained through official duties used to profit from prediction markets tied to events officials can influence.
  • California cites internal cases where insiders allegedly profited from sensitive events, such as U.S. strikes in Iran and the Maduro arrest bet on Polymarket, as rationale for the tightened rules.
  • The move sits within a broader U.S. policy debate, as lawmakers push federal legislation to curb insider trading on prediction markets.
  • Two parallel bills propose to bar high-ranking government officials from betting on prediction markets, with different emphases on war and sensitive operations—signaling potential cross-cutting regulation at state and federal levels.

Regulatory momentum beyond California

In response to ongoing concerns about insider access, Texas Congressman Greg Casar and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced the Bets Off Act in March 2026. The proposal would prohibit government insiders from placing bets on markets tied to war or other sensitive operations. At roughly the same time, Representatives Adrian Smith and Nikki Budzinski introduced the PREDICT Act, which would bar the President, lawmakers, and other high-ranking officials from participating in prediction markets. The bills collectively reflect a growing consensus that current frameworks do not sufficiently guard against conflicts of interest or the exploitation of privileged information.

Industry observers note that the new California directive does not replace federal action but rather adds a state-level layer of oversight that could influence how prediction-market platforms operate within the state. While enforcement mechanisms and timelines were not detailed in the order itself, the development underscores a widening regulatory lens on predictive markets and the potential for broader, more harmonized standards if federal measures advance.

Implications for the market and governance

For traders, policymakers, and platform operators, the California move highlights several practical considerations. First, it raises the cost and complexity of participation for officials and their networks, potentially shrinking the pool of publicly connected insiders who might have leveraged non-public information in prediction markets. Second, it reinforces a governance signal that conflicts of interest—once deemed a gray area—will be treated as a compliance risk with real consequences. Platforms hosting prediction markets may respond by tightening verification checks, enhancing disclosures, and imposing stricter controls around politically sensitive topics to avoid regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk.

In the broader regulatory landscape, the California action dovetails with federal proposals that seek to curb real-time exploitation and insider trading in state or federal decision environments. While the specifics of enforcement and cross-border applicability remain to be seen, the convergence of state and federal efforts points to a more proactive stance on governance in prediction markets. Analysts say this trend could slow the growth of speculative activity around politically sensitive events and push participants toward higher standards of transparency and accountability, even as some observers worry about chilling effects on legitimate market price discovery and risk assessment.

What comes next

What remains uncertain is how California will implement and police the new rules, and whether other states will adopt similar measures that could create a patchwork regulatory environment for prediction markets. Federal bills, if enacted, could provide uniform standards that affect both users and platforms nationwide. Observers will be watching for any enforcement actions tied to the executive order, as well as how platforms respond to the evolving mix of state and federal expectations around insider information and public-interest safeguards.

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The evolving policy landscape also raises broader questions about how prediction markets should be governed as tools for forecasting versus potential channels for improper gain. As lawmakers and regulators weigh the balance between innovation, market liquidity, and integrity, readers should monitor whether new rules push prediction-market ecosystems toward stronger compliance or toward strategic shifts in participation and product design.

Readers should watch for updates on enforcement actions in California, any follow-on guidance from the governor’s office, and the fate of federal proposals like the BETS OFF and PREDICT Acts, which could redefine how insiders interact with markets tied to sensitive political and security developments.

In the near term, the California order marks a notable step toward closing perceived loopholes in prediction-market governance and signals that public service will increasingly be measured not just by duties performed but by the integrity of decisions surrounding information access and financial risk.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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Detroit Set to Enter Michigan‘s Battle against Coinbase Prediction Markets

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Coinbase, Law, Detroit, Prediction Markets

Lawyers representing the US city of Detroit plan to file an amicus brief in Coinbase’s lawsuit against Michigan, which argues that federal regulators should have authority in overseeing prediction markets and not states. 

In a Thursday filing in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan related to state officials’ motion for a preliminary injunction, District Judge Shalina Kumar approved an order which will allow Detroit to file a brief supporting state authorities in their lawsuit against Coinbase. Kumar gave Detroit’s lawyers until April 3 to make the filing as the lawsuit continues. 

Coinbase, Law, Detroit, Prediction Markets
Source: US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan

In December, Coinbase filed its lawsuit against Michigan, as well as gaming authorities in Connecticut and Illinois, more than a month before the crypto exchange announced the launch of its prediction market services on the platform.

The company’s argument is centered on claims that prediction markets fall under the purview of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than state gambling regulators, challenging Michigan’s enforcement.

Companies offering event contract bets on prediction markets like Coinbase, Kalshi and Polymarket already face state-level lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions. Although the platforms have been supported by efforts from CFTC Chair Michael Selig, who proposed new rules for the commission, it was still unclear as of Friday how the legal battle between state authorities and federal regulators would unfold.

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Related: Federal regulation looms as 11 states go after prediction markets

Where will the chips fall for platforms dealing with state and federal authorities?

“The more the CFTC can do in this space [prediction markets] to put a comprehensive regulatory regime around it, the more likely it is for courts who are looking at the issue to say ‘actually, yes, this is a CFTC jurisdiction issue — this really is not just an end run around sports gambling bans in particular states,’” Stephen Piepgrass, a partner at international law firm Troutman Pepper Locke, told Cointelegraph.

According to Piepgrass, the cases could ultimately end up going back to the US Supreme Court, given its 2018 decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. That case gave US states the authority to regulate sports gambling, striking down a federal law that attempted to impose a ban on such activities.

US states have largely pushed back against lawsuits over prediction markets, but courts have sided with the platforms in some cases.

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This month, a judge ordered Kalshi to temporarily stop operating in Nevada, and the platform faces criminal charges in Arizona over alleged illegal gambling on sports and elections. However, a Tennessee judge blocked state authorities from enforcing gambling laws against the platform in February.

The Michigan Gaming Control Board reported that casinos based in Detroit casinos generated more than $200 million in revenue for January and February, providing more than $24 million in taxes for the US state.

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