Polymarket is seeking approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to bring its main prediction market back to U.S. users.

The company has discussed lifting its ban on U.S.-based traders with CFTC officials in recent weeks, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the talks. The ban has been in place since Polymarket reached a 2022 settlement with the agency and moved its main exchange overseas.

The CFTC cleared a separate U.S.-only Polymarket platform last November after the company acquired a registered exchange. That site has yet to fully launch.

Prediction markets let users trade contracts tied to future events, such as elections, sports games or economic data. These markets have drawn increasing scrutiny from various states, which argue these function as unlicensed gambling operations.

The CFTC would need to vote before it could remove Polymarkt’s U.S. block. That process may be simpler now because four commission seats are vacant, leaving Chairman Michael Selig as the only sitting commissioner.

Selig has in the past defended that states do not have the ability to police prediction markets, whose authority falls under the CFTC’s purview.

The talks also come after authorities accused a soldier of using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access Polymarket’s international exchange and make more than $400,000 from trades based on classified information.

Polymarket declined to comment.

Galaxy Digital has reported a first-quarter 2026 net loss of $216 million, with earnings per diluted share of $0.49 loss, narrowing versus Q1 2025. The firm’s results come as it continues tilting away from a crypto-market-driven model toward a data-center and AI-focused growth strategy anchored by its Helios campus in Texas.

For the quarter ended March 31, Galaxy posted gross revenue of $10.2 billion, roughly flat with Q4 2025, but down from $12.9 billion in the year-ago period. The results align with the company’s pivot toward recurring revenue streams while it continues to manage exposure to crypto asset prices.

Looking back at full-year 2025, Galaxy reported a net loss of $241 million on gross revenue of $61.4 billion. The company reiterated that near-term growth will hinge on scaling its data-center operations and monetizing AI workloads through Helios, rather than relying primarily on crypto trading activity.

Management noted that growth in the data-center segment is expected to begin contributing to earnings in the second quarter of 2026, once revenue recognition from the Helios campus in Texas starts to appear in the company’s financials. The Helios project, acquired in December 2022, is being developed into a large-scale data-center campus designed to support high-performance computing and AI workloads.

The quarterly figures underlined Galaxy’s strategic transition—from crypto-market cycles to a diversified model centered on Helios and AI-enabled data-center revenue.

Key takeaways

• Q1 2026 net loss: $216 million, with diluted-earnings per share of $0.49 (vs. a $0.86 loss per share in Q1 2025), signaling narrowing losses as the business shifts focus toward non-volatile revenue streams.
• Revenue situation: Gross quarterly revenue stands at $10.2 billion, flat versus the prior quarter but lower than the year-ago period, highlighting a move away from asset-price-driven swings toward recurring income.
• Crypto-price headwinds: Weaker digital-asset prices weighed on asset valuations, with Galaxy noting a roughly 20% drop in crypto market capitalization during the quarter. Digital Assets contributed $49 million in adjusted gross profit, while the Treasury and corporate segment bore heavy losses (about $167 million in adjusted EBITDA).
• Helios ramp and revenue timing: The company said data-center growth should begin contributing to earnings in Q2 2026 as Helios starts recognizing revenue, supported by ongoing Phase I deployments.
• Balance sheet and allocation: As of March 31, 2026, Galaxy reported $2.8 billion in equity capital, up 46% year over year. Equity is distributed across digital assets (33%), data centers (28%), and treasury/corporate holdings (39%).

Strategic pivot: from market cycles to infrastructure and AI

The quarter’s results reinforce Galaxy’s deliberate shift from a crypto-market-driven stance toward a more diversified business model anchored by Helios and AI-enabled data-center revenue. Galaxy executives have consistently signaled that the Helios campus—Dallas-area expansion of the Argo Blockchain acquisition into a broad HPC and AI facility—will be a long-term growth engine. In the latest update, management stressed that Helios is not just a hardware deployment but a platform for recurring revenue streams tied to capacity and service agreements with institutional clients and AI workloads.

Delivered milestones at Helios underscore the transition. Galaxy reported the first data hall to CoreWeave, a notable progress marker in Phase I, and reaffirmed that the project remains on budget and on schedule to deliver substantially all 133 megawatts of critical IT load under the Phase I lease by the end of Q2 2026. This implies a ramp in revenue recognition as data-center capacity comes online and tenants begin consuming services.

Analysts and investors watching Galaxy’s path will be focused on how quickly Helios monetizes its capacity, how pricing for high-performance computing and AI workloads evolves, and whether the data-center business can offset volatility from crypto markets. The company’s stated trajectory suggests a longer-term horizon where recurring fees and capacity utilization will provide more predictable cash flows than crypto asset price swings.

Operational clarity: Helios milestones and capacity targets

Galaxy has long framed Helios as the primary growth platform. The Texas campus, which began as a larger-scale data-center initiative anchored in PoE (power and cooling) efficiency and AI compute, has progressed toward a multi-phase deployment. Galaxy’s update indicates progress toward delivering most of the Phase I capacity—133 MW of IT load—by the end of the current quarter, with revenue recognition following as customers begin to deploy workloads.

Constructive progress on Helios matters beyond the topline numbers because it translates into a tangible shift in the business mix. The company has already pointed to the likelihood of Helicots (Helios’ capabilities) supporting AI workloads as a compelling use case for institutional clients seeking scalable compute capacity. If Helios meets its phased targets, the data-center segment could start contributing meaningfully to profitability during 2026, offering more resilience in soft crypto markets than a purely asset-price-driven business model.

As of the end of March 2026, Galaxy’s equity capital stood at roughly $2.8 billion, a 46% year-over-year increase. The capital mix—roughly one-third in digital assets, just under a third in data centers, and the remainder in treasury and corporate holdings—highlights the company’s diversified but still crypto-adjacent balance sheet. The trajectory implies risk has shifted toward infrastructure upside and capital-intensive growth rather than speculative crypto exposure alone.

Implications for investors and the market

Galaxy’s Q1 2026 results illustrate both the challenges and opportunities facing a crypto-adjacent firm trying to pivot into infrastructure-led growth. The weaker crypto price environment clearly depressed asset valuations, contributing to the quarterly loss structure that persists despite stabilizing per-share losses versus a year earlier. Yet the early indicators from Helios—data-center capacity coming online and a clear revenue ramp in the quarters ahead—offer a potential path to steadier, recurring income that could cushion earnings when crypto markets remain volatile.

Investors will be watching several moving parts: the pace at which Helios contributes to quarterly results, the ability to attract and retain long-term data-center tenants, and the management of capital allocation across the firm’s diversified portfolio. The 20% contraction in crypto market capitalization during the quarter underlines the sensitivity of Galaxy’s financials to digital-asset cycles, even as a portion of revenue becomes more deterministic through data-center contracts and AI compute services.

Additionally, the broader market context remains relevant. As Galaxy shifts toward a blended model, any regulatory developments around digital assets, data-center energy costs, or AI compute demand could influence the pace and profitability of Helios’ rollout. Analysts will also scrutinize how the Helios ramp aligns with expectations for the company’s 2026 guidance and whether the anticipated Q2 2026 revenue recognition from Helios translates into meaningful earnings uplift in the back half of the year.

In the short term, Galaxy’s results reinforce a narrative common to many crypto-adjacent operators: price action in digital assets will continue to reverberate through the earnings line, but the growth story is increasingly anchored in infrastructure, capacity utilization, and the monetization of AI workloads. The question for investors is whether Helios can deliver the reliable, scalable revenue streams necessary to offset periods of crypto weakness and drive a more durable earnings trajectory over the next several quarters.

Looking ahead, readers should monitor Helios’ progress toward full Phase I capacity, any updates on tenancy and utilization rates, and the broader demand environment for AI compute services. These factors will likely shape Galaxy Digital’s next earnings cycle and the long-term viability of its transition from a crypto-market focus to an infrastructure-led business model.

Opening arguments began April 28 in the Musk OpenAI civil trial in Oakland, with Musk’s lead attorney Steven Molo telling jurors that without Elon Musk’s $38 million in early funding and recruiting of top AI scientists, OpenAI would not exist, while Musk seeks up to $134 billion in wrongful gains to be funneled back to the company’s nonprofit arm.

Musk OpenAI opening arguments began on April 28 as CNBC reported that Musk, Altman, and Brockman all arrived at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland wearing suits, with Molo telling the nine-person jury that “without Elon Musk, there would be no OpenAI, pure and simple.” Molo urged jurors to set aside preconceived opinions, noting that “not everybody’s opinion is good, not everybody’s is bad.” As crypto.news reported, the nine jurors were seated on Monday after five hours of questioning during which many prospective jurors expressed dislike for Musk, with Judge Gonzalez Rogers acknowledging that “the reality is people don’t like him” while expressing confidence the selected jury would respect the judicial process.

Musk OpenAI Trial Enters the Evidence Phase on the Founding of a $852 Billion Company

The two surviving claims are breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. Musk originally filed 26 claims in August 2024, but a series of pre-trial rulings and his own strategic decisions reduced the case to these two. Musk is not seeking to recover money for himself: in January he asked that any damages be funneled back into OpenAI’s charitable arm rather than paid to him personally, with the $134 billion figure representing what his lawyers characterize as wrongful gains by OpenAI’s for-profit business and Microsoft. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and others as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for humanity’s benefit. He left the board in 2018 after a dispute over control. In 2023, he filed his original lawsuit. OpenAI restructured in October 2025 as a public benefit corporation in which the nonprofit holds a 26% stake plus additional warrants, a structure OpenAI says preserved its charitable mission. Musk says it buried it. As crypto.news documented, Musk’s xAI company was valued at $250 billion when it merged with SpaceX in an all-stock deal in February 2026, and Musk has since required Wall Street banks competing for SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO to purchase subscriptions to Grok, his AI chatbot, a move OpenAI has cited as evidence that the lawsuit is commercially rather than ethically motivated.

What the Trial Structure Means for the Outcome Timeline

Judge Gonzalez Rogers has divided the case into a liability phase and a remedies phase. She has allocated exactly 22 hours to Musk’s team and 22 hours to OpenAI and Microsoft combined, plus five hours for Microsoft’s separate defense, with those allocations covering all witnesses, opening statements, and closing arguments. The liability phase is expected to run through approximately May 21, with jury deliberations beginning around May 12. If the jury’s advisory verdict finds for Musk, the case moves to a remedies phase before Judge Gonzalez Rogers alone, who will determine the appropriate consequences. Among the remedies Musk is seeking are the removal of Altman and Brockman from OpenAI leadership, the unwinding of the October 2025 restructuring, and the redirection of profits to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm. OpenAI has said the lawsuit risks complicating its expected IPO, which Reuters has reported could value the company at $1 trillion.

OpenAI’s Defense and the Counter-Narrative

OpenAI’s legal team is expected to argue in its own opening statement that Musk was aware of and in some cases advocated for the for-profit conversion before leaving the board, that he pushed to fold OpenAI into Tesla before the 2018 departure, and that the lawsuit is a commercially motivated attempt to damage a direct competitor to xAI. As crypto.news tracked, OpenAI simultaneously faces a criminal investigation by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier over ChatGPT’s alleged role in advising the accused Florida State University shooter, adding a second legal front to what is already the company’s most consequential legal moment before its IPO. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said he expects the trial to result in “scrapes and bruises” rather than fatal damage, but added his characteristic note: “It’s Elon and never doubt him in these spots.”

Among the witnesses expected to testify over the trial’s four weeks are Musk, Altman, Brockman, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

OKX, BlackRock and Standard Chartered announce a joint framework to integrate BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized short-term Treasuries into collateral workflows, enabling off-exchange custody while trading on the same integrated venue. The arrangement marks a notable step in embedding tokenized real-world assets into traditional market infrastructure, pairing Standard Chartered’s custody capabilities with OKX’s institutional execution. By allowing BUIDL to serve as yield-bearing collateral without moving assets between venues, the framework aims to improve capital efficiency and broaden participation for qualified investors. The release outlines the collaboration, the custody model, and the path toward broader tokenization across markets.

Key points

• BUIDL can be posted as collateral off-exchange and held in regulated custody at Standard Chartered.
• BUIDL can be deposited and traded on-exchange, used as yield-bearing collateral for margin trading.
• The framework unites BlackRock’s BUIDL token, Standard Chartered custody, and OKX’s institutional execution and margining infrastructure into a single ecosystem.
• This marks the first time a globally systemically important bank (G-SIB) has acted as custodian in such an arrangement.

Why it matters

By combining BUIDL’s tokenization with regulated custody and integrated trading, the framework expands the utility of Real-World Assets and enables yield-bearing collateral within a single ecosystem. It links a major asset manager, a global bank, and a digital-asset exchange to demonstrate tokenization can operate within institutional workflows while preserving custody protections. This setup potentially broadens access to tokenized instruments and advances the integration of TradFi and digital markets.

What to watch

• Uptake by OKX VIP and institutional clients posting BUIDL as off-exchange collateral with Standard Chartered custody.
• Operational performance of on-exchange trading and off-exchange custody within the integrated venue (OKX Middle East).
• Plans to expand tokenization to additional assets, regions, or workflows.

Disclosure: The content below is a press release provided by the company or its PR representative. It is published for informational purposes.

OKX, BlackRock and Standard Chartered Launch Joint Framework to Establish New Utility for Tokenized Real-World Assets

• OKX to accept BlackRock’s tokenized short-term US treasury fund, BUIDL, as yield-bearing collateral for trading
• Standard Chartered to provide a comprehensive and reliable custody offering, the first-ever G-SIB-backed off-exchange tokenized collateral framework
• Initiative scales utility of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and enables broader market participation

DUBAI, April 28, 2026 — OKX, a leading global fintech company and crypto trading platform, today announced the launch of a joint framework with BlackRock and Standard Chartered to integrate BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized short-term treasury fund into collateral workflows, marking the first time a globally systemically important bank (G-SIB) has acted as custodian in such an arrangement. The framework enables OKX clients to hold collateral in regulated, off exchange custody while trading on the same integrated venue.

Through this joint framework OKX VIP and institutional clients can post BUIDL as collateral held off-exchange in regulated custody at Standard Chartered, while trading seamlessly on OKX Middle East, eliminating the need to move assets between venues. In addition, BUIDL can be deposited and traded on-exchange, and used as yield-bearing collateral for margin trading.

This framework unites BlackRock’s BUIDL – tokenized by Securitize (which has announced a proposed business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc. (Nasdaq: CEPT))- Standard Chartered’s regulated custody as a G-SIB, and OKX’s institutional execution and margining infrastructure. This framework delivers a uniquely integrated model where collateral custody and trading occur within a single, coordinated ecosystem, representing a key advancement toward embedding tokenization into global market infrastructure.

The framework also delivers:

• Capital at work: The ability to use BUIDL as collateral transforms idle margin into a yield-generating asset.
• Universal collateral: OKX is expanding the utility of Real-World Assets by establishing BUIDL as a platform-wide collateral.
• Superior protection: With BUIDL safeguarded by Standard Chartered, OKX clients obtain trading collateral segregated from OKX’s assets, while retaining the ability to trade on OKX without transferring custody, providing clients with exchange default protection.

This framework, which involves the participation of the world’s largest asset manager, a Tier 1 Global Bank, and a premier digital asset exchange, establishes a new utility framework for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It integrates traditional financial (TradFi) security with the agility of digital markets, embedding RWA tokenization into the core of global market infrastructure.

“BUIDL was designed to bring the benefits of tokenization to short term treasury exposure, allowing qualified investors to earn US dollar yields on blockchain rails,” said Samara Cohen, Global Head of Market Development at BlackRock. “The framework with OKX and Standard Chartered allows qualified investors to unlock new opportunities in how they deploy collateral.”

“This collaboration highlights the potential of tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) at scale. By enabling institutions to deploy BUIDL as on-chain collateral on OKX’s global platform, we improve capital efficiency while demonstrating how traditional financial instruments can operate seamlessly in digital markets,” said Haider Rafique, Global Managing Partner at OKX. “Tokenization is about making existing markets faster, more transparent, and more accessible.”

“Our role as custodian in this initiative reflects our commitment to delivering trusted and innovative solutions for clients as the financial ecosystem evolves,” said Margaret Harwood-Jones, Global Head of Financing and Securities Services at Standard Chartered. “By providing secure custody of BUIDL for this collateral use case, we are helping to ensure clients can access digital asset opportunities with the high standards of protection and compliance. This framework demonstrates how traditional financial institutions and digital market infrastructure can work together to bring tokenized assets safely and efficiently to global investors.”

The launch follows extensive institutional testing and integration. BlackRock’s BUIDL is issued on a public blockchain and invests in cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, with yield distributed on-chain. Its integration into OKX’s collateral framework demonstrates that tokenized RWAs can operate at scale within existing institutional workflows for trading, margining, and liquidity management.

For further information, please contact:

Media@okx.com

About OKX

OKX is a fintech company on a mission to modernize money and markets. Today it is trusted by more than 100 million people around the world who use OKX services to invest, transact and trade digital assets across a number of financial instruments including spot, futures, and decentralised markets. As one of the world’s largest platforms, OKX is known for its exchange, wallet, and onchain ecosystem used by everyday people and large institutions.

OKX maintains regional offices in the United States, Europe, UAE and Singapore with a number of local offices across São Paulo, Hong Kong, the Republic of Türkiye, and Australia. Over the past several years, it has built one of the world’s most comprehensive regulatory compliant, licensed fintech companies.

OKX is steadfastly committed to transparency and security and publishes Proof of Reserves reports on a monthly basis to ensure customer funds are always protected and available to people. To learn more about OKX, download the app or visit: okx.com.

About OKX Institutional

OKX Institutional delivers secure digital asset market infrastructure for institutional market participants. We offer highly liquid spot and derivative markets through global offshore and regional onshore regulated exchange orderbooks and OTC RFQ, plus critical institutional services across the trade lifecycle.

From banks integrating crypto products to asset managers exploring allocation and trading firms scaling derivative strategies—we provide the compliant, flexible foundation institutions need to compete in digital asset markets.

Disclaimer

BlackRock

BlackRock’s purpose is to help more and more people experience financial well-being. As a fiduciary to investors and a provider of financial technology, we help millions of people build savings that serve them throughout their lives by making investing easier and more affordable. For additional information on BlackRock, please visit www.blackrock.com/corporate.

Standard Chartered

We are a leading international banking group, with a presence in 54 of the world’s most dynamic markets. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, here for good.

Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell below $76,000 on Tuesday after failing to break $80,000 as uncertainties surrounding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and macroeconomic conditions unnerved the market. Meanwhile, technicals and onchain data sent mixed signals on BTC’s ability to sustain the recovery.

Key takeaways

• Bitcoin is trapped in a tight range with strong technical support at $75,500 and heavy resistance near $80,000.
• Bitcoin’s onchain metrics are mixed, with buy pressure rising but spot volume and active addresses declining.

Bitcoin price is sandwiched between two key levels

Bitcoin’s 30% recovery from sub-$60,000 lows reached on Feb. 6 was stopped by selling around the $78,000-$80,000 supply zone.

Related: Three Bitcoin charts say BTC price may rally toward $82K

Note that this is where the 20-week exponential moving average (EMA) sits currently, reinforcing the importance of this resistance level.

MN Capital founder Michael van de Poppe said the ongoing retracement was “typical behavior” ahead of the FOMC meeting. 

“Bitcoin touched the resistance zone at $79,000 and is consolidating,” van de Poppe said, adding:

“I think we’re still in for a strong period on the markets.”

BTC/USD daily chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

On the downside, Bitcoin retested support at $75,500, which is also the 20-day EMA, the 100-day EMA and the lower trend line of an ascending channel, as shown in the chart above.

Glassnode’s UTXO realized price distribution (URPD), which shows the average prices at which ETH holders bought their coins, reveals that immediate resistance is around $78,000 where investors acquired 335,650 BTC. Investors acquired roughly 298,560 BTC at an average price of $75,500, marking it as a key support level.

Bitcoin URPD all-time high partitioned. Source: Glassnode

The chart above also shows a larger supply overhang around $82,000-$84,000, which could stall price rallies, while a significant support zone sits between $65,500 and $67,000.  

Notably, this is the price range defined by the ascending parallel channel in the TradingView chart above.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s liquidation heatmap shows BTC in a classic liquidation sandwich with heavy ask orders around $78,600 and dense bid positions below the spot price, as shown in the figure below. This highlights the relative tightness of the current market structure.

Bitcoin liquidation heatmap. Source: CoinGlass

As Cointelegraph reported, buyers are expected to fiercely defend the $75,500-$76,000 support level, while bears are mounting a defense at the $80,000 psychological level.

Bitcoin’s onchain “fundamentals remain weak”

Bitcoin market data is showing a “mix of bullish momentum and cautious sentiment,” contributing to the uncertainty in the market, data from Glassnode shows.

Spot CVD (cumulative volume delta, a metric measuring the difference between buying and selling volume over time) has increased to $54.8 million million from $18.3 million, marking a near 200% increase over the last week.

“This reflects strong bullish sentiment among market participants, suggesting heightened confidence in Bitcoin’s short-term direction,” the onchain data provider said in its latest Market Pulse report.

Spot volume has decreased by 13.8% to $5.99 billion from $6.95 billion a week ago, “suggesting reduced market activity,” Glassnode added.

Bitcoin spot CVD and spot volume charts. Source: Glassnode

Meanwhile, the number of daily active addresses dropped by 1.6% over the same period, “reflecting a more subdued state of network participation and reduced speculative interest,” Glassnode said, adding:

“While buying pressure remains firm, reduced speculative activity suggests a more measured approach, with investors balancing risk and capital rotation.”

Swissblock’s Bitcoin Fundamental index, which measures network health, growth, demand, activity, and capital flows, echoes this outlook.

The index rose toward neutral with BTC’s recovery from macro lows below $60,000, and picked up again as the price reclaimed the $70,000 level.

“Bitcoin’s price structure points higher, but fundamentals remain weak,” the private wealth manager said in an X post on Monday, adding:

“Price can still rise here. But for a medium-term trend shift, Bitcoin needs neutral-to-strong fundamentals to confirm.”

Bitcoin fundamental index. Source: Swissblock

Institutional demand for Bitcoin is also in neutral territory. While Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, continues to buy BTC, flows into US-based spot Bitcoin ETFs turned negative, recording $273 million in net outflows on Monday.

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

The press release reports that the United Arab Emirates will exit OPEC and OPEC+ on May 1, 2026, ending nearly six decades of membership. It frames the move as a strategic shift toward greater production flexibility as the UAE expands capacity toward 5 million barrels per day and argues that existing quotas may constrain a growing economy. Analysts cited in the release describe potential changes in global oil dynamics, including supply expectations and market volatility, while noting regional security tensions and price pressures as contextual backdrops. The note sets the stage for how this departure could reshape producer coordination and market sentiment.

Key points

• Exit takes effect May 1, 2026, ending UAE’s six-decade OPEC membership.
• UAE capacity expansion toward 5 million barrels per day.
• Departure could alter OPEC+ unity and producer discipline.
• Context includes regional security tensions and energy price dynamics impacting markets.

Why it matters

The UAE’s exit reshapes influence within oil markets by reducing OPEC+ unity and granting Abu Dhabi more latitude to monetize its expanding capacity. The move could widen supply options and inject greater uncertainty into pricing, affecting traders, policymakers, and energy markets as market participants reassess spare capacity, regional risk, and the pace of production growth.

What to watch

• Monitor Brent price and market volatility around the May 1 transition.
• Watch any guidance from UAE authorities on production policies post-exit.
• Observe reactions and shifts in alignment among other OPEC+ members.

Disclosure: The content below is a press release provided by the company or its PR representative. It is published for informational purposes.

UAE Exit from OPEC Signals Shift in Global Oil Dynamics

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – April 28, 2026: The United Arab Emirates’ decision to exit OPEC and OPEC+ marks a significant turning point in global oil markets, according to eToro Market Analyst Sam North, highlighting shifting geopolitical dynamics and evolving supply expectations.

The UAE announced it will leave the producer alliance effective May 1, 2026, ending nearly six decades of membership. The move reflects a broader strategic shift as the country seeks greater flexibility over its production policy amid rising capacity and changing market conditions.

Commenting on the development, Sam North, Market Analyst at eToro, said: “The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC and OPEC+ from May 1 ends nearly six decades inside the oil producers’ club and marks a serious shift in the geopolitics of crude.

For markets, this is about more than one country wanting to pump more oil. The UAE has spent heavily to lift production capacity toward 5 million barrels per day, and OPEC+ quotas had increasingly looked like it was stifling a growing economy. Leaving gives Abu Dhabi more room to monetise those investments.

The timing also matters. This comes against a backdrop of regional security frustration, tensions around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, and a sense that consumers are once again being squeezed by high energy costs and depleted strategic reserves.

The immediate dip in Brent showed the market’s first instinct: more UAE barrels could mean more supply and lower prices. But the rebound also told the other half of the story. Extra capacity does not instantly become risk-free supply when regional bottlenecks and security threats remain front and centre.

For OPEC+, this is a blow to unity and to Saudi Arabia’s ability to marshal producer discipline. It does not mean a price war starts tomorrow, but it raises the risk that one emerges if others decide to defend market share. In trading terms, this adds a new volatility premium: more potential supply, less cartel discipline, and a Gulf energy map that suddenly looks a lot less predictable.”

The announcement comes at a time of heightened uncertainty in global energy markets, with geopolitical tensions, supply chain constraints, and demand recovery trends all contributing to price volatility. The UAE’s exit is expected to reshape market expectations around supply flexibility and producer coordination.

Media Contact:
PR@etoro.com

About eToro

eToro is the trading and investing platform that empowers you to invest, share and learn. We were founded in 2007 with the vision of a world where everyone can trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. Today we have 40 million registered users from 75 countries. We believe there is power in shared knowledge and that we can become more successful by investing together. So we’ve created a collaborative investment community designed to provide you with the tools you need to grow your knowledge and wealth. On eToro, you can hold a range of traditional and innovative assets and choose how you invest: trade directly, invest in a portfolio, or copy other investors. You can visit our media centre here for our latest news.

Ostium Labs on Tuesday rolled out what it calls the first “decentralized execution layer,” an architectural overhaul that routes net directional flow from the protocol’s traders to a network of institutional hedging partners, including Jump, prime brokers, and other firms active in traditional markets.

Until now, Ostium’s public liquidity pool both settled trades and absorbed all net directional exposure, a structure the team said served early users but capped execution quality and open interest. Under the new model, a separate capital pool programmatically routes net exposures offchain to institutional partners and settles once daily. A buffer layer sits atop the public liquidity pool, which now operates as an intraday lending layer rather than a counterparty.

“Programmatically hedging onchain flow with traditional market participants required building a new kind of infrastructure, a translation layer between smart contracts and institutional-grade messaging protocols, with sub-100-millisecond latency across every step,” CTO Marco Antonio Ribeiro said in a press release viewed by The Defiant.

Co-founder and CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn has long said that orderbooks are the wrong venue for tokenized real-world assets, and that the right model is to quote directly from the underlying market.

By referencing real-time depth from offchain venues, Ostium said its allowable open interest now scales dynamically across most major assets, removing static caps and introducing rollover fees that reflect the underlying asset’s carry cost. Users retain custody of funds, and settlement remains instant onchain.

With the new infrastructure in place, Ostium plans to take on centralized CFD brokers, targeting a market that moves roughly $10 trillion in monthly volume.

Monthly trading volumes on Ostium hit an all-time high of $6.11 billion in March, and the platform has processed more than $50 billion in cumulative volume since launching in 2024, according to DeFiLlama.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Something fundamental is changing in how commerce works. It’s happening right now, at the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain payments, and most people haven’t fully registered what it means yet.

AI agents – software systems that can perceive, decide, and act autonomously – are beginning to transact. They’re paying for APIs, settling invoices, and interacting with infrastructure in ways that traditional payment rails were never designed to handle. The credit card, the bank login, the merchant onboarding flow: all of it is friction that agents can’t navigate the way humans do.

Ask yourself: how many agents do you think you’ll have? Three, five -it’s a common answer. Ten. I have 200.

By the numbers -if you have 10 or 20 agents per human, you’re between 70 to 140 billion agents in the world. Universally, most people will agree: there’s going to be more AI agents than there are humans. – Yat Siu, Animoca

What comes next -the rails, regulatory frameworks, and business models – is precisely what Consensus 2026 is convening to figure out. When 15,000+ of the world’s most influential crypto, AI, and finance minds gather at the Miami Beach Convention Center from May 5 to 7, agentic commerce will be one of the defining conversations of the week.

“That’s assisted checkout, not true agentic payments”

Christian Catalini, MIT professor and founder of the Cryptoeconomics Lab, draws a line most people in the industry haven’t drawn yet.

“Most agents today operate just as LLMs paired with a credit card,” he says. “That’s assisted checkout, not true agentic payments.”

“Real agentic payments begin when the AI is the counterparty,” Catalini explains. “The actual test for programmable rails isn’t whether an agent can pay – it’s whether it can do things no human-facing rail allows: atomic settlement against delivery, per-second payment streaming, or transacting with a counterparty that has no KYC footprint.”

That’s not a near-future scenario. It’s a near-term engineering problem. And Consensus is where the engineers, investors, and policymakers working on it will be in the same room.

The internet was built for humans. Agents need something different

Google Cloud is not a company known for hedging its bets on technology cycles. Its presence at Consensus 2026 – and its active investment in blockchain payment rails – is as clear a signal as any that agentic commerce is being taken seriously at the highest levels of the technology industry.

“The convergence of agentic AI, blockchain payments, and commerce is still in its early stages, but momentum is building,” says Rich Widmann, Google Cloud’s Global Head of Strategy for Web3. “Google is actively participating in open protocols like x402 and deepening partnerships across the Web3 ecosystem to help bring these use cases to scale.”

Widmann is direct about where the friction lies: “The biggest friction points center on the fact that most products are still built for humans, not agents. Sign-ups, logins, and manual onboarding create barriers that slow agentic commerce down.”

The rails race: x402, MPP, and the fight for the agentic stack

If AI agents are going to transact at scale, they need payment infrastructure designed for them from the ground up. Two protocols are emerging as early contenders for that role, and both will have a presence at Consensus 2026.

x402, the open payment protocol built on HTTP and championed by Coinbase, is designed to allow agents to pay for API access and digital services with stablecoins in a single, frictionless flow. Erik Reppel, x402’s founder and Head of Engineering at Coinbase, will be at Consensus making the case for why open, interoperable rails are the right foundation for the agentic economy.

MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), developed by Tempo and backed by Stripe, offers another vision for how agents can negotiate and settle payments autonomously. The presence of both protocols at the same event – in front of 15,000 developers, investors, and enterprise decision-makers -makes Consensus the de facto arena where the early standard-setting debate gets played out.

Also in the room: Stefano Bury, head of Virtuals Protocol, one of the leading platforms for deploying autonomous AI agents, and Chi Zhang, co-founder of Kite, whose team is building at the intersection of agent infrastructure and decentralized payments.

CoinDesk University: From Theory to Implementation

For attendees who want to go beyond the mainstage debates and into the mechanics of how to actually build and deploy agentic payments, CoinDesk University offers a structured, three-day curriculum that takes participants from first principles to advanced implementation -no prior crypto experience required.

Day 1 lays the foundation. Afternoon workshops walk attendees through setting up a stablecoin wallet and business dashboard with Circle, then pivot to session on compliance, followed by back-to-back workshops on using OpenClaw and x402.

Day 2 goes deeper into the stack, with sessions on building a full agentic infrastructure, managing agentic economy risks, and the increasingly urgent question of how to prove human identity in an AI-saturated world. By Day 3, the curriculum reaches masterclass territory: workshops on deploying AI trading bots with stablecoins, trading on prediction markets with autonomous agents, and a capstone Agentic Masterclass that brings the full arc together.

The format is intentionally immersive. Each day pairs hands-on workshops with mainstage sessions, networking lunches, and “No Dumb Questions” Q&A sessions.

The window is open. It won’t be open forever

Agentic commerce is not a future state. It is an early-stage present, moving faster than most industries have had time to notice. The protocols being debated at Consensus 2026 could become the rails that trillions of dollars in machine-to-machine transactions run on. The regulatory frameworks being discussed could define what’s permissible for a decade.

The people in the room at the Miami Beach Convention Center from May 5 to 7 will be the ones who had a voice in how this unfolds. Everyone else will be working with what they decided.

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Join 15,000+ builders, investors, and industry leaders at Consensus 2026, May 5–7, Miami Beach. Register now at consensus.coindesk.com

Wisconsin has joined the growing number of U.S. states being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as that agency insists on its jurisdiction over prediction markets trading at firms such as Kalshi and Crypto.com.

Several states have gone after those businesses, accusing them of violating state gaming laws via the betting taking place on the growing platforms, but CFTC Chairman Mike Selig has led a legal pushback against states including New York, Arizona, Illinois and Connecticut. He’s argued that the derivatives regulator, which he leads as the sole member of what’s meant to be a five-member commission, has “exclusive jurisdiction” over the trading of event contracts that he argues are an emerging form of the same kinds of derivatives activity long handled by the CFTC.

Last week, Wisconsin sued Kalshi, Coinbase, Polymarket, Robinhood and Crypto.com for running unlicensed gambling operations in the state — echoing the claims made against the industry elsewhere.

Selig has now responded in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, said he’s trying to send a message: “If you interfere with the operation of federal law in regulating financial markets, we will sue you.”

Also last week, New York sued Coinbase and Gemini over their prediction markets businesses, and days later, the CFTC responded with its own lawsuit against the state.

Arizona has been pursuing a criminal case against Kalshi, but a court there paused the prosecution earlier this month, with the judge arguing that the federal agency is likely to be successful making its case that the U.S. law will preempt state gambling laws.

Read More: U.S. CFTC adds New York to string of states its suing to stop prediction market pushback

TON Tech, the infrastructure arm of The Open Platform (TOP), has introduced Agentic Wallets on TON — an open-source, non-custodial standard that gives AI agents the ability to hold and spend funds on the TON blockchain autonomously.

Per a press release shared with The Defiant, under the new system, users fund a dedicated wallet for each agent, set a spending budget, and retain the ability to revoke access at any time. The agent operates within those parameters independently, with no intermediary involved.

Telegram designated TON as the sole blockchain infrastructure for its mini-app platform earlier last year, giving TON exclusive access to a user base now exceeding one billion.

As a major developer of apps and tools for Telegram, TOP is positioned as a key infrastructure player in that ecosystem. The company reached a $1 billion valuation after raising $28.5 million led by Ribbit Capital and is the developer of Telegram’s Crypto Wallet — the official custodial wallet app embedded in the messaging platform. As The Defiant reported previously, Crypto Wallet recently expanded to offer perpetual futures trading across more than 50 assets, via an integration with Lighter.

For developers, Agentic Wallets are designed to support trading bots with predefined budgets, DeFi agents automating staking or portfolio management, and subscription payment automation, per the release.

“Agentic Wallets turn AI agents from assistants to actors,” said Andrew Grekov, Head of TON Tech, continuing:

“Agents on Telegram can not only communicate, but transact — making payments and interacting with on-chain services on behalf of users, without ever touching their keys.”

The launch arrives as the broader industry races to build financial rails for autonomous agents. Biconomy and the Ethereum Foundation recently unveiled ERC-8211, an execution standard for on-chain AI agents designed to let them carry out complex, multi-step DeFi strategies without pre-encoding every parameter at signing time.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.