Bitcoin (BTC) staged a relief rally during Monday’s New York session, climbing to the mid-70,000s as oil prices retreated below $100 per barrel in the wake of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran. BTC briefly touched about $72,760, rebounding from a dip that had stretched across the prior weeks, and traders cautioned that the momentum would need a decisive extension beyond key resistance to confirm a trend change.

Key takeaways:

• BTC surged roughly 7% to around $72,700 after news of a two-week U.S.–Iran ceasefire, signaling a temporary easing of geopolitical risk appetite.
• In the last 24 hours, roughly $431 million in short positions were liquidated across the crypto market, with BTC shorts accounting for about $214.8 million.
• Analysts warn that a sustained move higher requires a break above the $72,000–$76,000 zone; failure to clear that region could see risk-off pressure resume.
• Oil volatility accompanied the move, with WTI retreating from intraday highs around $110–$118 to the mid-$90s as the ceasefire news circulated.

Bitcoin’s rebound amid ceasefire signals

Data from market tracking and live feeds show BTC rising as much as 7.4% to approximately $72,760, erasing earlier losses that had persisted over the previous two weeks. The rebound followed President Donald Trump’s confirmation of a two-week pause in hostilities with Iran, a ceasefire conditionally linked to the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz. Traders noted that geopolitics can move crypto markets swiftly, sometimes eclipsing traditional technical signals in the near term.

Despite the bounce, observers emphasized that the immediate macro backdrop remains delicate. The ceasefire is contingent on ongoing diplomacy, and any regression or stalled talks could reintroduce risk premia into crypto markets. Analyst commentary cited in market updates suggested that while the relief rally is meaningful, it does not guarantee a long-term trend reversal without sustained catalysts and a breach of key price levels.

Liquidity backdrop and macro drivers

Liquidation data painted a mixed picture of risk dynamics. In the past 24 hours, total liquidations across the crypto market reached about $431 million, with BTC short liquidations contributing roughly half of that sum at around $214.8 million. The broader market’s tilt toward short-covering helped buoy prices in the near term but did little to alter the underlying multi-week consolidation already underway.

The price move came as crude oil swung violently on the ceasefire news. Oil futures initially spiked above the $110–$118 per barrel range in response to regional tensions, but then reversed sharply, dropping as much as 16% to around $92 from an intraday high. WTI crude traded around the mid-$90s during the session, illustrating how commodity markets still interact with crypto as a proxy for macro risk sentiment.

Technical view: range, resistance, and what to watch

From a technical standpoint, the current setup remains fragile for bulls, according to market observers. A number of traders highlighted a potential bearish flag pattern on the daily chart, suggesting that upside momentum could be capped unless BTC clears the upper boundary of the immediate resistance zone. In practice, the line in the sand sits near $76,000; a decisive close above that level could reintroduce bullish momentum toward higher targets. Conversely, rejection at or near the upper boundary could invite renewed downside pressure toward the next significant support areas.

Analysts emphasized that the real test lies in the follow-through. One trader noted that even with the relief rally, “the bear-flag scenario remains a live risk until sustained footing is established above the key resistance.” Another market observer pointed out that a successful upside extension beyond $76,000 could open a path toward the high-$80,000s or low-$90,000s, while a rejection from that zone could pave the way for a renewed move toward the $60,000s region if macro catalysts turn unfavorable.

The ongoing narrative also points to a broader market context. As Cointelegraph coverage has indicated, BTC has shown a tendency to oscillate between fear and relief around pivotal macro events, with on-chain signals and liquidity dynamics feeding into the price action. The coming weeks, including key data prints and policy signals, will likely determine whether the current rebound stalls in a choppy range or evolves into a more durable uptrend.

What readers should watch next

Investors should keep an eye on several developing factors. First, the durability of the ceasefire and any tangible diplomatic progress during upcoming talks will be a clear influencer of risk appetite. Second, macro catalysts—such as the release of Fed minutes and upcoming consumer price index data—could reintroduce volatility and test the resilience of BTC’s rebound. Finally, watch for price action around the $72,000–$76,000 zone: a clear, sustained break above that band would be a meaningful sign for bulls, while a rejection could invite renewed downside pressure toward established long-term support levels.

In the near term, traders appear divided on whether the relief rally can be converted into a longer-lasting trend. The unanswered question remains: will geopolitical news continue to shape crypto markets with the same immediacy, or will domestic macro triggers begin to dominate price action as the week progresses?

South Korea’s financial regulators have ordered all domestic crypto exchanges to adopt a single, strict system for delaying withdrawals, aiming to block a surge in voice phishing scams that rely on speed.

The Financial Services Commission and Financial Supervisory Service announced the new rules, removing the discretion exchanges once had to let users bypass holding periods, local news outlets report.

In the past, platforms set their own exceptions to keep trading fast. Fraud groups learned those rules and coached victims to slip through them.

Voice phishing scams often push victims to convert cash into crypto and send it out within minutes. A delay, even a short one, can interrupt the scam by giving victims time to reconsider or allow alerts to surface before funds leave an account.

Under the new system, exchanges must apply the same criteria when reviewing withdrawal exceptions. These include account history, transaction patterns and sudden changes in behavior. Officials expect fewer than 1% of users will qualify for instant withdrawals. Platforms must also tighten identity checks and monitor fund flows more closely.

The move marks a shift from industry-led safeguards to a national standard.

In other markets such as the U.S. and Europe, withdrawal holds are common but set by individual firms. Some exchanges even let users set their own timelocks to prevent unwanted withdrawals.

The South Korean regulators did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for further comment.

Key Highlights

• Alibaba partnered with China Telecom to unveil a 10,000-chip AI computing facility in Shaoguan, Guangdong, utilizing Alibaba’s proprietary Zhenwu processor technology.
• This facility represents the first large-scale deployment of Zhenwu chips in China’s Greater Bay Area, capable of handling AI model training with parameters reaching hundreds of billions.
• Performance metrics show 30% improved training and inference efficiency, with individual card throughput jumping nearly tenfold compared to earlier technology.
• Expansion plans call for scaling the facility to 100,000 chips, while smaller enterprises can access computing resources through China Telecom’s service platform.
• This deployment comes after a comparable 10,000-chip Huawei Ascend 910C facility began operations in Shenzhen the previous month.

Alibaba (BABA) and China Telecom have unveiled a massive AI computing facility featuring 10,000 chips in Shaoguan, located in Guangdong province. The infrastructure relies exclusively on Alibaba’s proprietary Zhenwu AI processors, which were engineered by the company’s T-Head semiconductor division.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited, BABA

This unveiling represents a milestone as the largest Zhenwu chip deployment to date within the Greater Bay Area region. According to Alibaba Cloud, this initiative signals a transition in China’s AI computing landscape “from achieving high-end performance milestones to widespread industrial adoption.”

The facility employs an advanced high-performance networking framework that enables all 10,000 processors to function as a unified supercomputing system. Alibaba reports this configuration achieves 30% greater training and inference efficiency, while individual card throughput shows nearly a tenfold improvement over previous-generation systems.

The infrastructure supports training for AI models containing hundreds of billions of parameters — positioning it alongside the most sophisticated AI development projects worldwide.

The system maintains a latency level of 4 microseconds, which Alibaba credits to the sophisticated networking framework connecting the processors. This metric is critical for enterprise AI applications where rapid response times are essential.

Beijing’s Drive Toward Indigenous AI Computing Infrastructure

This launch aligns with a comprehensive national initiative. Beijing incorporated intelligent computing infrastructure into its 15th five-year strategic plan last month, while an AI action blueprint from the State Council issued in August emphasized optimized expansion of computing capabilities nationwide.

By the conclusion of June last year, China’s aggregate computing capacity reached 962,000 petaflops — representing 21% of global capacity, marking a 73% year-over-year increase, based on data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

The Shaoguan facility has already been implemented in healthcare and advanced manufacturing applications. Small and medium-sized enterprises can obtain computing access via China Telecom’s platform, with flexible pricing options based on card usage or hourly rates.

Alibaba has also revealed intentions to expand the facility from 10,000 to 100,000 chips. This expansion strategy targets cost reduction and enhanced resource utilization.

Industry Context: Huawei and China’s Semiconductor Competition

This announcement follows a comparable achievement from the previous month, when China’s inaugural 10,000-card intelligent computing facility — utilizing Huawei’s Ascend 910C processors — commenced operations in Shenzhen.

That facility delivers 11,000 petaflops of computing power and has been integrated with another 3,000-petaflop facility activated in 2024. Shanghai is simultaneously developing a 10,000-card facility through an INESA state-owned subsidiary, designed for compatibility with various domestic processor architectures.

While Chinese processors continue to lag behind Nvidia in individual performance metrics, Beijing’s approach emphasizes large-scale cluster infrastructure and optimized networking to narrow the performance differential.

U.S. export controls on Nvidia processors have expedited China’s domestic semiconductor development trajectory. Alibaba’s T-Head division has played a pivotal role in this effort, alongside Huawei.

BABA shares advanced 7.79% on the announcement day, with after-hours trading adding another 0.82% to its Hong Kong-listed shares (728-HK).

• Solana price has gained in the past 24 hours as Bitcoin retests $72,000.
• The SOL token could rally to $150 amid the US-Iran ceasefire.
• However, continued weakness could allow bears to target $70 or lower.

​Solana’s latest rebound has revived bullish speculation, with decent gains aligning with an uptick for risk asset markets.

As traders digest the impact of easing geopolitical tensions amid the ceasefire between the US and Iran, the key question is whether a shift in sentiment could propel Solana to its year-to-date highs of $150.

​Solana eyes $90 as geopolitical risk cools

As noted, the broader cryptocurrency market pushed higher overnight Tuesday after US President Donald Trump announced a two‑week ceasefire deal with Iran.

The news has eased fears of a deeper regional conflict, with the Pakistan‑brokered talks coming ahead of a 48‑hour deadline set by Washington.

Stocks and cryptocurrencies rose as risk sentiment changed from defensive positioning to an aggressive hunt for upside exposure.

The sharp gains saw more than $425 million in short positions liquidated in the past 24 hours, with over $100 billion added to the global crypto market capitalization.

​Bitcoin edged above the $72,000 mark, and Ethereum climbed to $2,270, boosting altcoins as traders rotated capital back into major tokens and high‑beta plays. Solana’s upswing had SOL advancing to above $86.

The move toward $90 erases part of last week’s drawdown that followed the Drift Protocol exploit.

​SOL price analysis

While SOL’s percentage gains pale in comparison to intraday moves of Zcash, Bittensor, and LayerZero, the uptick was still significant from a market‑structure point of view.

The recovery helped re‑establish a higher trading range, suggesting that the worst of the exploit‑driven capitulation may be over if the ceasefire holds and broader crypto inflows continue.

​On the charts, SOL has recently been shadowed by a developing bear flag formation.

The classic chart pattern usually signals downside continuation if a clean break occurs, and its formation had bears threatening a drop back toward the $70 region.

​The bounce to near $90 is crucial even as the bearish structure remains.

If bulls can consistently defend the $80-$85 band and convert the area into a solid demand zone, the next immediate resistance is likely to emerge around $95-$100.

This is where prior supply and key moving averages converge, and a breakout could pave the way for a higher resistance cluster in the $120-$135 zone.

Bulls can target January 2026 highs near $150.

However, if buyers fail to break and hold above the $90 level, the technical backdrop would increasingly favor an extension of the downtrend.

This outlook exposes SOL to renewed downside pressure toward $70, with critical support near $54.

BlackRock’s BUIDL token on Ethereum has surpassed $1 billion in market capitalization, achieving roughly 115% gains year-to-date as of April 6, 2026. The milestone marks significant growth for the tokenized fund product since the start of 2026.

BUIDL represents BlackRock’s foray into on-chain tokenized assets, offering exposure to short-duration U.S. Treasury bills and cash equivalents on the Ethereum blockchain. The token’s market cap growth reflects broader institutional adoption of blockchain-based financial products.

Sources: Token Terminal

This article was generated automatically by The Defiant’s AI news system from publicly available sources.

Vugar Usi, the newly appointed CEO of MEXC, has a provocative explanation for the collapse in memecoin trading: the tokens didn’t lose their appeal, the rest of the financial system caught up to them.

Gold moves on a Trump tweet. Oil spikes on a geopolitical rumor. Equities swing on a single Fed headline.

“Everything has kind of become a meme at this point,” Usi said in an interview with CoinDesk.

“Meme coins were driven by social sentiment, virality, speculation,” he continued, adding that today one of “President Trump’s tweets does all these three.”

That thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, long synonymous with memecoin speculation, into a broader “trade everything” platform spanning tokenized equities, commodities and prediction markets, built around a retail base that accounts for roughly 98% of activity by his estimate.

“It’s very funny to see that memecoins today are fighting for the same attention that gold and silver does,” Usi said.

The bet is that retail doesn’t need replacing with institutional flow, it needs more things to speculate on.

Usi points to prediction markets, where traders bet on the outcome of events rather than the price of assets, and to political announcements that move commodities and equities before most of the market has time to react — what he describes as trading by people “who have their close proximity to the news.”

The whole thesis hinges on whether retail is fading or simply migrating to whatever asset is most volatile at any given moment.

Betting against the institutional pivot

That view puts MEXC on a different trajectory from its largest competitors.

Binance, OKX, and Bybit have spent the last two years courting institutional liquidity, building out derivatives desks, and positioning for the ETF-driven flows that increasingly dominate bitcoin’s price discovery.

Usi, a Bitget veteran who helped scale that exchange to the world’s fourth-largest before joining MEXC, is betting in the opposite direction. At Bitget, he said, roughly 80% of trading volume came from institutions. At MEXC, it is almost entirely retail, and he wants to keep it that way.

“Retail is our bread and butter,” Usi said, framing MEXC’s zero-fee model — which he claims returned $1.1 billion to users in 2025 — as the real marketing engine, in contrast to the Messi endorsements and Formula One sponsorships that defined his previous employer’s rise.

His plan is to extend that model across asset classes, adding tokenized stocks, gold, silver, prediction markets, and eventually card and earn products, positioning MEXC less as a crypto exchange than as a retail-first Robinhood competitor operating offshore taking cues from Asia’s superapps.

Fixing failures

The harder question is whether MEXC can expand without tripping over the regulatory problems that have plagued it over the past few years.

MEXC spent much of 2025 managing fallout from the so-called White Whale incident, in which a pseudonymous trader alleged that $3 million of his funds had been frozen under opaque risk-control rules.

After months of public pressure, MEXC’s chief strategy officer Cecilia Hsueh issued a public apology in October, acknowledging that the company’s “risk, operations, and PR teams have not kept up” with its growth.

“We fucked up. We apologize to The White Whale, and his money is already been released. He can claim it at any time,” Hsueh wrote on X.

Data shows that withdrawals from MEXC surged in the aftermath and remain elevated throughout 2025. But, in the last few months, that trend has reversed.

Data from CoinDesk Research shows MEXC commanded second place in exchange volume at the end of 2025 with a 5% market share, while CoinGecko highlights its 90% growth in volume throughout the year.

“MEXC commands a high market share despite falling in the lower-tier category (grade C). This continues to underline the disconnect between volume capture and assessed risk/compliance among certain venues,” a CoinDesk data exchange benchmark report from November reads.

Compliance readiness was “one of the key missing points in MEXC’s growth,” Usi told CoinDesk.

He said the exchange has “kick-started” conversations with regulators across Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with the goal of building a platform that is “more transparent, more compliant.”

On a potential U.S. entry, even in the event the CLARITY Act passes, he was noncommittal, calling the market “expensive and complex.”

That hesitation reflects a deeper constraint: the speed, extreme listing breadth, and minimal friction that powered MEXC’s rise are the same traits that draw regulatory scrutiny, leaving it to pursue a global “everything app” strategy without the licenses, banking rails, or institutional clients its competitors are building around.

Can MEXC add guardrails without losing its edge?

There’s a certain kind of crypto trader that loves everything MEXC is and would hate to see it change.

The question is whether MEXC can clean up its model without losing the memecoin chaos that made it work.

Or, is that even necessary? Data shows that MEXC’s growing loyal traders might not care.