Richard Heathcote, who until March was Tether’s chief investment officer, is planning to sell part of his 1.26% stake in the stablecoin giant, according to a Bloomberg report.

Heathcote is working with PJT Partners to sell his holding in the San Salvador, El Salvador-based company, Bloomberg said, citing sources close to the matter. The sources said discussions with potential buyers were ongoing. They declined to comment on the company’s potential valuation.

Heathcote took on a non-executive advisory role at the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, in March, and was replaced by his deputy Zachary Lyons.

In February, Tether scaled back from plans to raise as much as $20 billion after facing investor resistance to a proposed $500 billion valuation that would rank the stablecoin issuer among the world’s most valuable private companies. Tether advisers then followed up with plans to raise $5 billion. Tether reported a full-year profit of more than $10 billion for 2025.

Tether did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment. PJT Partners declined to comment. Heathcote could not be reached.

Bitcoin is trading in a market that’s getting harder to define.

Hovering around $64,000 at the time of writing, Bitcoin is down by almost 50% from its cycle peak. That’s a much shallower draw down than previous cycles, but the bull run this time around did not reach the same heights.

The 2025 rally was driven by exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows, post-halving momentum and renewed institutional demand, pushing the market to a new all-time high of more than $126,000 in October 2025.

Since then, the trend has been inexorably downward, but analysts are split on what that decline signifies.

According to Standard Chartered and other bullish institutional desks, Bitcoin may have already reached its cycle bottom last month, with structural demand from ETFs and treasury companies, and improving long-term capital flows reducing the likelihood of a deeper draw down.

Other analysts take a more cautious approach, seeing Bitcoin as likely in the final stages of its bear market but not at a confirmed bottom yet.

Bitcoin’s four-year cycles. Source: Galaxy

Galaxy Research, for example, argued in June that traditional cycle signals have not fully reset, meaning the risk of further pain cannot be ruled out.

Curiously, analysts are no longer just divided on price targets but on what a “cycle bottom” actually means in a market increasingly shaped by ETFs, macro liquidity, and shifting global capital flows.

Some analysts still see further downside ahead

At the most cautious end of the spectrum is Russell Thomson, chief investment officer at Hilbert Capital asset management firm.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Thomson said he believes Bitcoin remains in a downcycle and is likely to break below recent lows before forming a durable base. He said that the current structure is still dominated by global macro conditions and liquidity rather than crypto-native signals.

Related: $60.4K Becomes ‘most important area’: Five things to know in Bitcoin this week

Thomson expects Bitcoin to first revisit the $56,000-$52,000 range, representing summer 2024 lows, before potentially extending losses further to between $40,000 and $45,000, an area he associates with prior consolidation phases in the early 2024 market structure.

Timing-wise, he sees Bitcoin’s broader cycle rhythm still broadly intact, with a potential low forming around October 2026, although he stressed that macro policy shifts could pull that forward.

“Fed rate cuts and/or [the CLARITY Act] passing could put the bottom in earlier than that,” he said.

He argued that institutional capital has not insulated Bitcoin from macro cycles, but rather deepened its sensitivity to global liquidity conditions, making it behave more like a “high-beta macro instrument” than a “detached crypto-native asset.”

That view is echoed by analysts at Citibank, who cut their 12-month price target for Bitcoin to $82,000 from $112,000 on July 1, highlighting how Bitcoin’s growing integration into traditional financial markets has strengthened its correlation with risk assets and macro liquidity conditions rather than reducing volatility.

Late-stage bear market, but not confirmed bottom yet

A more positive but still cautious view comes from André Dragosch, head of research (Europe) at Bitwise.

Dragosch told Cointelegraph that the current environment resembles a “late-stage bear market,” arguing that multiple indicators already suggest downside exhaustion.

He noted that sentiment has deteriorated to levels last seen after the collapse of FTX in 2022, a period typically associated with seller fatigue.

Dragosch also does not believe the cycle low has been confirmed. “I don’t think that we have seen the final bottom just yet, although we are probably very close,” he said, emphasizing that no single indicator can reliably identify a cycle bottom.

Related: Dormant $1.9M Bitcoin tied to New York lawsuit moves after nearly 15 years

He also highlighted the structural shift in the market, pointing to the rise of ETFs and institutional participation, which have increased off-chain trading and reduced the reliability of some historical cycle indicators.

Despite this uncertainty, he said downside risks appear increasingly limited at current levels, adding that Bitcoin could begin outperforming artificial intelligence equities over the coming months if macro conditions stabilize.

Bitcoin price and its cycle bottoms. Source: Galaxy

In Galaxy’s base-case scenario, the firm pointed to a potential slide to between $40,000 and $46,000, depending on how liquidity and macro conditions evolve.

‘When will Bitcoin bottom?’ could be the wrong question

A more structural interpretation comes from Dean Chen, an analyst at Bitunix Exchange.

Chen told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin is still in a decline, but one increasingly defined by global liquidity competition rather than internal crypto market structure.

“I believe Bitcoin remains in a down cycle, although it has entered a relatively stable valuation range supported by the structural capital base created after the approval of US spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024,” Chen said.

While ETFs have created a more persistent institutional bid, Chen argued that Bitcoin is now competing directly with other major global capital narratives, particularly artificial intelligence and equity markets, for marginal liquidity.

Related: Tim Draper says Arkham got Bitcoin wallet attribution ‘wrong’

“The bigger challenge isn’t Bitcoin itself; it’s the competition for global liquidity,” he said. “Capital continues to flow toward AI infrastructure, equities, and other high-growth opportunities.”

In his view, this changes how cycle analysis should be understood altogether.

“The wrong question is ‘when will Bitcoin bottom?’” Chen said. “The more important question is: ‘when will crypto once again become the most attractive destination for global risk capital?’”

He noted that derivatives markets now play a significantly larger role in price discovery than in previous cycles, with funding rates and open interest increasingly driving short-term volatility.

That means Bitcoin may not form a sharp V-shaped bottom at all, he said, but instead spend an extended period building a structural base.

A Bitcoin cycle that no longer looks like previous cycles

Beyond price targets, what emerges from these competing views is a deeper disagreement over how Bitcoin’s cycle structure should even be defined.

Thompson sees Bitcoin as still firmly inside a macro-driven down cycle, where liquidity conditions have not yet fully turned.

Dragosch sees a late-stage bear market where exhaustion signals are already visible, even if confirmation is still pending.

Chen argues that Bitcoin is now competing directly with global capital allocation themes such as AI and equities, making traditional bottom-calling frameworks increasingly incomplete.

In this cycle, it seems, the debate is not just about where Bitcoin bottoms but whether a “bottom” is still a single moment at all.

Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

Cardano wallet firm SecondFi says it will not resume “normal operations” and will instead focus solely on “returning assets to affected users” as it continues to grapple with last month’s $2.4 million ADA exploit.

Developer Emurgo, claimed yesterday that “SecondFi will not resume normal operations, even once the audits are complete.”

It added, “Going forward, our involvement in SecondFi is limited to a dedicated asset recovery team, tasked solely with returning assets to affected users.”

The firm has yet to release an audit of what took place during the exploit, which saw 16 million ADA ($2.4 million) stolen by bad actors, and 129 million ADA ($18.5 million) taken by a mysterious white hat hacker. 

Emurgo is also yet to launch a recovery plan for affected users and is still in the process of arranging one.  

Read more: Mystery deepens over Cardano wallet’s $18.5M white hat hacker

What was announced, however, was a new site for users to check the status of their wallet, however, it isn’t live yet. 

What’s the deal with the white hat hacker funds?

SecondFi wallets were drained last month after a “nonce derivation” issue exposed users’ private keys.

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The exploited code created deterministic transaction data that could provide clues to recreate a wallet’s private key and facilitate the ADA theft. 

In the weeks that followed, users speculated that the white hat hacker may not actually have been associated with Emurgo. 

An X Spaces discussion with Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson, fueled speculation after he said, based on information derived from a meeting between Emurgo and Cardano’s governance firm Intersect, that the white hat hacker was unknown to Emurgo. 

Hoskinson then noted, “or at least [Emurgo] said it is not affiliated with Emurgo.” 

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SecondFi’s latest statement on July 4 notes that the assets acquired through its emergency response, which involved the white hat hacker, “are currently protected and accessible.”

As for the threat actor funds, it claims that Emurgo has established a recovery fund address here, which currently contains $2.8 million worth of ADA.

It’s unclear whether these funds are made up of the rescued ADA, or Emurgo’s own supply.

Protos has reached out to Emurgo for comment and will update this piece if we hear anything back.

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Japanese companies are turning to bitcoin and XRP as a weak yen pushes them to diversify their corporate treasuries, according to SBI VC Trade, as the crypto exchange’s registered accounts passed 2 million.

The crypto arm of financial group Tokyo-based SBI Holdings said use of its corporate service, SBIVC for Prime, has grown as the weak yen drives firms to spread reserves beyond cash, with added demand from companies that hand out bitcoin or XRP through shareholder-perk programs.

It reported the account milestone on Tuesday, roughly double the 1 million it counted in 2025.

The 2 million figure combines its VCTRADE and BITPOINT services and follows SBI VC Trade’s April 2026 merger with sister firm BitPoint Japan. The company plans to fully integrate the two brands around the end of December, which it said should cut costs and unify service levels.

Vitalik Buterin has confirmed that AI-assisted analysis used by Co-Invest CEO Franklyn Wang correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum proposal.

The identification comes two weeks after Buterin publicly challenged whether current AI tools could pierce online anonymity.

Wang’s winning submission identified an anonymous rewrite of EIP-7503 by analyzing the way it explained mathematical and technical concepts.

“The doc was an anonymous EIP-7503 rewrite he’d hidden by writing it in Chinese and machine-translating it,” Wang wrote in a Monday X post after Buterin confirmed the result. “The tell wasn’t his words, it was his reasoning.”

Vitalik Buterin’s June 22 post challenging viewers to discover his anonymous writing. Source: Vitalik Buterin

Some of the crypto industry’s most prominent contributors, including Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, have relied on pseudonyms to conceal their identities. Some analysts believe that if AI can reliably identify authors from their reasoning patterns, that would make anonymous technical contributions harder to sustain across open-source blockchain communities.

Related: AI agent development hasn’t accelerated as expected, Zuckerberg says

Buterin tests AI deanonymization

In a February paper, researchers from ETH Zurich and Anthropic claimed large language models have made online deanonymization practical at scale. 

The study found AI could identify pseudonymous online users by extracting identity-related information from unstructured text, searching for potential matches and reasoning over the most likely candidates, outperforming traditional deanonymization techniques.

“There have recently been claims that AI text analysis will make online anonymity untenable. So let me cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment,” Buterin said on June 22.

He confessed to publishing a document of “medium importance” to Ethereum at some point in the past decade under a different name.

“Find it,” he challenged.

Related: Yield Guild Games cuts 35 staff, shuts game publisher to focus on AI

Wang said that Co-Invest ranked Buterin as the most likely author of an anonymous December 2024 rewrite of EIP-7503, with roughly 20% confidence, which was about 10 times higher than the next candidate in its analysis of 27 documents.

Buterin later revealed he had written the anonymous rewrite in Chinese, translated it into English using Qwen 2.5 and manually corrected the translation in an attempt to disguise his prose.

“Notice that the stylistic hints that his AI picked up on were intellectual habits and style of math and algorithm explanation, which bypassed my obfuscation strategy (which only covered prose) completely,” Buterin wrote.

Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski said Monday he worked with Wang in a 2023 project using GPT-4 to try to identify Bitcoin creator Nakamoto by matching writing style in cryptography research, but said the effort failed to produce a high-confidence result.

According to Novakovski, Wang later applied a similar approach to Buterin’s anonymity challenge.

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

A New York lost-property lawsuit targeting dormant Bitcoin wallets has drawn a fresh filing from the Digital Chamber, a major blockchain industry trade association. In a Monday amicus brief, the group urged the court to reject claims that inactive self-custody wallets should be treated as abandoned property under state law.

The case, brought in late May by a claimant identified as “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming-based companies, seeks ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses. The addresses are reported to contain about 3.7 million BTC, valued at roughly $234 billion at the time referenced in the underlying reporting. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted that the lawsuit could effectively become a test for how dormant or inactive crypto assets should be handled under traditional “lost property” frameworks.

Key takeaways

• The Digital Chamber’s latest amicus brief argues that classifying dormant self-custody wallets as abandoned property would create a “pervasive cloud on title” for crypto owners.
• The filing frames the issue as a threat to the core legal premise of digital property ownership, with potential ripple effects beyond crypto into traditional finance.
• Some wallets named in the lawsuit have already shown renewed activity, complicating assumptions about “dormancy” and control of assets.
• Even if the plaintiffs were to win legally, the private-key requirement remains a practical hurdle for transferring control of funds.

A trade association warns against “cloud on title”

According to the Digital Chamber, allowing the lawsuit’s theory to proceed would undermine widely accepted principles of how digital assets are owned and transferred. In its second amicus brief in the New York case, the organization opposed the plaintiffs’ attempt to establish ownership based on the addresses’ inactivity.

The trade association warned that treating dormant wallets as abandoned property would effectively cast uncertainty over self-custody holdings. The brief characterizes the potential outcome as a “pervasive cloud on title across self-custody wallets,” implying that investors and institutions could face heightened legal risk simply for keeping private keys and not moving funds for extended periods.

Digital Chamber also argued that a decision rooted in the plaintiffs’ approach could have “negative ripple effects” reaching traditional finance. The group’s point appears aimed at the broader market effects of uncertainty—particularly where regulated entities rely on stable, predictable legal definitions of ownership and control.

Digital Chamber describes itself as the oldest and largest digital asset trade association, representing more than 250 members that include exchanges, banks, investment firms, and other participants across the industry.

The dispute centers on dormant wallets and New York’s lost-property law

The lawsuit was filed in late May and targets 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses, according to the reporting cited in earlier coverage from Cointelegraph: New York lawsuit seeks ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses. The amicus brief arrives as the legal fight begins to take shape around the interpretation of New York’s lost-property statutes as applied to cryptocurrency held in self-custody.

Among the addresses named in the suit, the filing and accompanying discussion referenced estimates placing the total at 3.7 million BTC, with some wallet addresses allegedly linked by analysts to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. The earlier reporting that references a claim from Sani (founder of Timechain Index) is attributed in the source text to a post on X: according.

It’s important for readers to recognize what the legal process is actually testing. The argument is not simply about whether money can be recovered from inactive addresses, but about whether inactivity alone can trigger ownership claims under a state framework traditionally used for tangible property.

Renewed wallet activity challenges assumptions about “dormancy”

While the lawsuit proceeds, the real-world behavior of at least some listed addresses has shifted. According to analysis cited in the source text, some of the dormant Bitcoin wallets named in the case have begun moving funds.

Galaxy Digital head of research Alex Thorn, as quoted via an X post referenced in the original report, said at least 31 of the addresses moved 17,527 BTC in June. That compares with earlier activity where only five addresses reportedly transferred 4,834 BTC in February. The figures were attributed to Thorn’s monitoring: according to Alex Thorn.

The renewed activity has included notable cases such as the address “1KV47,” which reportedly transferred 30 BTC—worth about $1.88 million in the source text—on Saturday. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph stated that this marked the wallet’s first movement in almost 15 years, since August 2011: Bitcoin address “1KV47” moved after nearly 15 years.

For investors and market participants, these developments matter because they expose a practical and conceptual mismatch: legal arguments that treat inactivity as a proxy for abandonment can collide with the reality that wallet “dormancy” may be temporary—or could change when private keys are used after long periods.

Private keys remain the gate to control

Even if the plaintiffs’ legal theory were to succeed, the question of control over the underlying Bitcoin remains central. The source text notes that it is unclear how the plaintiffs could gain control of the assets without possessing the private keys to the wallets.

That point effectively highlights the asymmetry between on-chain identifiers (addresses and balances) and off-chain control (private keys). Courts may determine legal ownership, but moving or spending Bitcoin still requires cryptographic authorization.

The case is also not proceeding unopposed. According to the source text, a pseudonymous defendant filed a notice of appearance and a motion to dismiss on Thursday, asserting that they control one of the dormant wallets named in the lawsuit. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph references that dismissal effort: defendant dismiss New York lawsuit.

In practice, that kind of response could reduce the likelihood of any blanket “ownership transfer” outcome, forcing the court to grapple with ownership claims at the level of individual wallets and the rights of those claiming control.

What to watch next

With the Digital Chamber urging rejection on principle and some named wallets already showing movement, the case may hinge on how the court interprets abandonment versus ownership in the context of self-custody. The next key developments to monitor are the court’s handling of motions to dismiss and whether other defendants challenge the plaintiffs’ ability to prove control beyond the addresses themselves.

EU lawmakers on Tuesday adopted a position paper on digital assets, setting out their view on how the bloc should approach crypto regulation after the rollout of its Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.

The paper calls on the European Commission to assess whether activities including decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto lending and borrowing, staking and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) should be brought more clearly into the EU’s regulatory perimeter. It also urges consistent application of MiCA across member states and warns against national rules that could fragment the bloc’s digital asset market.

The vote turns the report, “Digital assets – challenges for the competitiveness and integrity of the European Union’s financial system,” into Parliament’s formal policy position on digital assets, but it does not directly amend MiCA or create new legal obligations for crypto firms.

MiCA’s transitional period ended on July 1, requiring crypto-asset service providers that fall under the framework to obtain bloc-wide or national authorization to continue operating across the European Union.

The EU Parliament overwhelmingly approved its digital asset policy stance. Source: European Parliament

EU lawmakers look beyond MiCA 

The report reflects growing pressure in Brussels to address digital asset activities that remain outside MiCA’s current scope.

While MiCA established licensing and conduct rules for crypto-asset service providers and issuers of certain tokens, lawmakers have continued to debate how the framework should treat DeFi, staking, lending, NFTs and tokenized financial assets.

Related: EU crypto rulebook faces enforcement challenge as MiCA transition ends

The EC has already been reviewing whether MiCA should be expanded. In May, it opened a public consultation that sought feedback on potential changes to the framework, including whether additional crypto activities should be covered and whether MiCA’s restrictions on interest-bearing stablecoins should be revisited.

The Parliament report approved Tuesday also takes a more supportive tone toward tokenization and euro-denominated stablecoins, arguing that digital assets could support the competitiveness of EU financial markets if regulated consistently across the bloc.

Magazine: Bitcoin decouples from tech stocks, Ether eyes ‘selling wave’: Market Moves

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