Crypto prices were slightly higher on Monday amid rising odds in prediction markets for a near-term U.S.-Iran peace deal, as Iranian negotiators arrived in Doha for talks.

Bitcoin gained 1.6% in 24 hours to $77,500, ether rose 1.4%, and the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) added 1.56%.

Traders on Polymarket pushed the probability of a permanent deal this month to 37%, up from roughly 14% on Friday. The odds for a deal are at 46% by early June and 72% by the end of July. The market has drawn roughly $178 million in volume.

The move follows a Truth Social post from President Trump on Saturday saying the framework agreement was “subject to finalization.” Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati arrived in Doha earlier today for talks, per CNN.

A diplomat briefed on the visit told CNN that the agenda is focused on the Strait of Hormuz and highly enriched uranium. Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign ministry has described the deal as a memorandum of understanding in a first phase, with broader talks over 30 to 60 days, CNBC reported. Pakistan and Qatar are mediating.

The Strait of Hormuz has been largely blockaded since the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on February 28, though traffic has partially resumed in recent days.

Crude oil fell 5.4% to $91.30 per barrel. Gold rose 1.35% to $4,570 per ounce. The dollar weakened, with the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) falling around 0.3%.

Trump’s tone remains conditional. “It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before,” he wrote Monday.

Read more: Bitcoin trades above $77,000 as oil’s 5% slide pushes Asian equities higher

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs has blocked access to Polymarket, saying the crypto-based prediction market amounts to online gambling under local law.

The ministry said it had cut access to the platform and was tracing affiliated social media accounts for possible restrictions across other digital channels.

Alexander Sabar, director general of digital space supervision, claimed that platforms that allow users to wager money on uncertain outcomes remain gambling products, even when they use blockchain technology or crypto assets.

Polymarket lets users trade contracts tied to real-world events, including elections, sports, crypto prices and political outcomes. The platform has grown into one of the largest crypto prediction markets, but regulators in several jurisdictions have treated parts of the business as gambling rather than financial-market activity.

Indonesia’s statement did not name Kalshi, a U.S.-regulated prediction market operator, or other platforms but said authorities would restrict similar services that facilitate online gambling.

The order could extend to other prediction-market platforms if Indonesian regulators determine that they allow users to wager money on uncertain real-world events.

Indonesia’s move follows a broader clampdown on prediction markets in Asia. India recently blocked Polymarket after authorities classified such platforms as prohibited online money gaming, with Kalshi also facing potential scrutiny. Polymarket is separately seeking approval in Japan by 2030, where strict gambling rules limit most forms of betting outside state-sanctioned activities.

The Indonesian ministry said Singapore, Brazil and India have blocked Polymarket, while Taiwan, Thailand, China and Japan have imposed restrictions under local law. The prediction market is also blocked in Ukraine, where there’s no legal way for it to come back.

The regulator urged Indonesians not to access or participate in digital betting activity, including markets that use crypto assets, citing potential financial losses and violations of Indonesian law. The ministry said it would keep coordinating with law enforcement and other stakeholders to monitor similar platforms.

A New York lawsuit filed by Noah Doe seeks legal ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin wallet addresses.

A New York Bitcoin wallet lawsuit filed on May 1, 2026 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York asks a court to declare that 39,069 dormant addresses legally belong to plaintiff Noah Doe.

The complaint, filed under index number 153119/2026 through Brooklyn law firm Lewis and Lin LLC, invokes New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B.

Doe says he discovered the wallets in October 2024 after identifying a security vulnerability that caused owners to permanently lose the ability to withdraw their holdings.

He developed a proprietary algorithm to identify wallets meeting the legal standard for abandonment, reported them to the NYPD, and spent more than a year attempting to locate their owners before filing suit.

What the Bitcoin wallet lawsuit is actually claiming

The complaint seeks a declaratory judgment declaring that Noah Doe and his two assignee companies, designated ABC Company and XYZ Company, are the legal owners of the 39,069 wallets and their contents.

Doe transferred ownership rights in all but 18 wallets to ABC Company on December 1, 2025, which subsequently transferred 17.7% to XYZ Company.

The listed addresses include wallet “12c6D,” associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, and “1Feex,” linked to the Mt. Gox exchange hacker. Sani, founder of blockchain analytics platform Timechain Index, estimated the total holdings across the listed wallets at approximately 3.7 million BTC, valued at around $285 billion at current prices. Crypto.news has tracked broader legislative efforts to establish legal frameworks around federal Bitcoin holdings.

Why the case could set a precedent for abandoned crypto property

The central legal question is whether dormant, self-custodied Bitcoin wallets can be treated as abandoned property under existing state law. Exchange-held assets already have dormancy and escheatment frameworks, but self-custodied wallets outside any institutional ledger sit in a legal grey zone that no court has formally resolved.

Timechain Index’s founder noted a potential procedural flaw: the plaintiffs sent legal notices to Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash addresses, while many old Satoshi-era wallet balances sit in unnotified Pay-to-Public-Key format scripts. If a court accepts the claim, it could establish precedent for how abandoned-property rules apply to decentralised assets entirely outside exchange custody.

Crypto.news has reported on the US government’s own Bitcoin holdings, as the legal and regulatory framework around Bitcoin ownership continues to evolve. The Bitcoin (BTC) price page tracks live market reaction as the lawsuit draws attention to dormant wallet dynamics.

A suspected third-party Safe module exploit has drained about $3.2 million from wallets across Ethereum and Base, with multiple teams pointing to an external module as the cause.

Blockchain security platform Blockaid reported the incident on Monday, saying it involved a contract labeled “SquidRouterModule,” which initially led to confusion over a possible link to the cross-chain protocol Squid.

Squid later said on X that the issue was unrelated to its core protocol and instead involved a third-party module integrated into Safe wallets.

“A third-party SquidRouterModule was exploited, not Squid’s Router contract,” Squid said, adding that the contract shares its name but not its code.

The incident highlights how a trusted wallet module can be used to move funds if it has been granted broad execution permissions within a smart account.

86 Gnosis Safes drained for $3 million in about two hours

Safe, formerly Gnosis Safe, is a multi-sign wallet running on multiple networks, which requires a minimum number of users to approve a transaction before execution.

It can also be extended with optional modules, which are smart contracts that allow approved code to execute actions on behalf of the wallet.

Related: DeFi hacks shake institutional confidence as risks outpace yields

According to Blockaid, the attack affected at least 86 Safe accounts within roughly two hours, with all stolen tokens swapped to Dai (DAI) via attacker-controlled Uniswap V3 pools.

Source: PeckShieldAlert

The suspected root cause is a vulnerability in SquidRouterModule, which allegedly allowed the attacker to impersonate authorized delegates and trigger unauthorized token swaps, Blockaid said.

Module attribution and Safe response

Safe Labs CEO Rahul Rumalla said the accounts “do not seem to be operated on official Safe Wallet product,” adding that it remains unclear how and where they were created and managed, likely created through externally deployed integrations.

Source: Rahul Rumalla

He said Safe Wallet surfaces such risks through “Safe Shield,” a feature designed to flag potentially malicious or unverified modules and guards before they are used. The CEO added that the exploited module had already been flagged as malicious by Blockaid, which is included in Safe Shield’s risk detection ruleset.

Cointelegraph approached Safe and its CEO for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Magazine: ETH bears growling, Tom Lee’s buying, XRP to ‘explode’: Market Moves

NEAR Protocol’s token climbed 15% over the past 24 hours to $2.8, extending a month-long rally that has seen the price of NEAR double in the past month.

The move comes amid the success surrounding NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain transaction system. The product allows users to request a desired outcome, such as swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana, while third-party solvers execute the transaction behind the scenes.

DefiLlama data shows NEAR Intents has processed more than $19 billion in cumulative volume and generated about $32 million in fees. The figures have drawn renewed attention to the protocol after months of limited price movement.

The rally accelerated further after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes described NEAR, Hyperliquid’s HYPE and ZEC as crypto’s “holy trinity” in a post on social media, before suggesting there’s a “long way to go” in its rally.

NEAR gained about 30% as traders rotated back into tokens tied to artificial intelligence and blockchain infrastructure earlier in the month, while institutional demand has been growing. The Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP listed in Europe has grown to roughly $40 million in assets under management, after seeing $7 million in inflows in a single week.

Investors are also watching an upcoming June network upgrade that introduces dynamic resharding. The change is designed to automatically split network shards as demand increases, potentially improving scalability during periods of heavy usage.

Despite the recent surge, NEAR remains well below its 2022 peak near $20.

NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain focused on applications, AI infrastructure and cross-chain transactions. The network uses a proof-of-stake model and markets itself as a platform designed to simplify interactions across blockchains while handling large volumes of activity through sharding.

Two Texas Congressional candidates supported by millions of dollars in spending from interest groups aligned with the cryptocurrency industry are headed for runoffs this week in races for the US Senate and House of Representatives.

On Tuesday, Democratic voters in Texas’ 18th congressional district will decide between incumbent Al Green and challenger Christian Menefee to run in November’s general election. Statewide, voters will choose between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent John Cornyn for the Republican primary for US Senate.

Both Tuesday races are runoffs after none of the candidates failed to secure a majority in Texas’ March primaries. The crypto industry, through spending on media by political action committees (PACs), has stakes in both races, which could influence policy and the makeup of Congress going into 2027.

As of Sunday, Protect Progress, affiliated with the Ripple- and Coinbase-backed Fairshake PAC, reported spending $5 million to support Menefee over Green. The PAC spent $2.8 million on ads opposing Green. Menefee also has the endorsement of the Blockchain Leadership Fund, a committee backed by Anchorage Digital and Chainlink Labs, though it had not reported any expenditures as of Monday.

Source: US Federal Election Commission

The outcome of the primaries could influence who will ultimately win Texas’ 18th district and one of the state’s two Senate seats in the November general election, potentially affecting which political party controls Congress in 2027. Under a Republican majority, lawmakers have passed key pieces of legislation supported by the crypto industry, including the stablecoin GENIUS Act.

At least one of the ads funded by Protect Progress to support Menefee did not mention crypto or blockchain, but rather Green’s opposition to US President Donald Trump. Bill King, a former opinion writer for the Houston Chronicle, said in a local FOX26 segment that aired on Sunday:

“I saw 12 television commercials yesterday paid for by the Protect Progress PAC […] and that same group of people are the ones that are primarily funding Trump.”

Related: Texas Lt. Gov. calls for study of crypto, prediction markets  

The Fellowship PAC, funded by Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and Anchorage, reported spending $500,000 to support Paxton over Cornyn for the US Senate seat. The expenditure came about 24 hours after Trump endorsed Paxton, saying that Cornyn had been “very late in backing” him as a Republican candidate for president.

Prediction markets heavily favor Paxton and Menefee

The Kalshi prediction market gave its users 91% and 96% chances on event contracts favoring Menefee over Green and Paxton over Cornyn, respectively.

Source: Kalshi

The platform has consistently provided event contracts favoring the Democratic candidate since February, while Paxton’s odds surged above 90% for the first time after Trump’s endorsement on Tuesday, and stood at almost 96%, at last look on Monday. Bets on that race topped more than $16 million in total volume.

Rival predictions market platform Polymarket gave both candidates similar chances in Tuesday’s runoffs.

Magazine: ETH bears growling, Tom Lee’s buying, XRP to ‘explode’: Market Moves