Crypto World
Regulatory Backlash: $110B in Outflows Forces South Korea to Rethink Crypto Tax
South Korea’s political deadlock over virtual asset taxation has broken under the weight of market reality. Lawmakers from both major parties have agreed to delay the planned 20% Crypto Tax on gains until 2027 following data revealing $110 billion in annual capital flight. This bipartisan reversal is a strategic pivot driven by a retail exodus that has drained liquidity from domestic exchanges in favor of offshore derivatives platforms.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) confirmed that outflows accelerated in the second half of 2025, with $60 billion leaving the country in just six months. Traders are not just cashing out; they are moving capital to jurisdictions that offer the leverage and hedging tools currently banned on local soil.
- Capital Flight: Annual outflows hit an estimated $110 billion in 2025, with 57% of volume moving to Binance to access futures and leverage.
- Political Response: Both the ruling People Power Party and opposition Democratic Party agreed to delay the 20% tax implementation to 2027.
- Market Impact: Operating profits for domestic exchanges plunged 38% in H2 2025 as traders bypassed local spot-only restrictions.
The Mechanics of the Exodus
The data paints a picture of a market structure failure. While the FSC noted a 14% increase in outflows to 90 trillion won ($60 billion) in the second half of the year, the drivers are structural, not sentimental.
Domestic giants like Upbit and Bithumb are legally restricted to spot trading. In a volatile market, this restriction renders them obsolete for sophisticated traders looking to hedge downside risk or speculate with leverage.
This is not a sell-off. It is an arbitrage migration. A joint report by CoinGecko and Tiger Research estimates that 57% of the total outflows flowed directly to Binance.
South Korean traders now account for approximately 13% of Binance’s futures volume. The net result is a massive transfer of fees abroad; foreign exchanges earned an estimated 2.7 times more revenue from Korean users than domestic platforms did in 2025.
The disparity has crushed local profitability. Despite a 31% rise in deposits to 8.1 trillion won ($5.4 billion), operating profits for South Korea’s 18 exchanges collapsed by 38% to 380.7 billion won ($253.4 million). The volume is there, but the high-value transactional velocity has moved elsewhere. We are seeing similar liquidity demands globally; EDX Markets launching KRW perpetual futures suggests institutional players are already positioning to capture this volume offshore if domestic regulations don’t adapt.
The FSC report explicitly linked the outflows to “arbitrage and other similar activities,” a tacit admission that the current regulatory framework is bleeding value.
Regulatory News: The Policy Gap
The decision to delay the tax is an emergency brake, not a solution. The opposition Democratic Party, previously adamant about implementing the tax in 2025, capitulated after realizing the Capital Flight could permanently cripple the domestic fintech sector.
With 11.1 million crypto accounts in the country, representing over 20% of the population, the political cost of taxing a shrinking market became untenable.
The post Regulatory Backlash: $110B in Outflows Forces South Korea to Rethink Crypto Tax appeared first on Cryptonews.
Network News
ETHEREUM FACES KEY MOMENT WITH QUANTUM, AI CHANGES AHEAD: The first couple of months of 2026 have forced the Ethereum community into a kind of introspection—one that goes beyond price, beyond technical upgrades, and into the question of what the network is actually trying to be. Even before this year, there has been a sense among builders and executives that Ethereum was on the verge of another growth phase—this time driven not by crypto-native users but by institutions and technology. Neobanks, as some argued, would quietly onboard millions by abstracting away the complexity of wallets and gas fees. Ethereum, in this framing, wouldn’t need to win users directly. It would sit beneath the interface, powering a new financial stack that, on the surface, looked nothing like crypto. It was a continuation of a long-running thesis: that Ethereum’s success would come from invisibility. That vision has been shaped in part by years of previous upgrades aimed at improving user experience and reducing costs. Changes like “proto-danksharding”, introduced in the Dencun upgrade, significantly lowered fees for layer 2 networks by increasing data downloads for transactions, while ongoing improvements to the base layer have made transactions more efficient. While the price of the network’s ether (ETH) token has been determined by market forces, these upgrades have, together, helped move Ethereum closer to a model where users interact with applications without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure. But that narrative began to change a few weeks into the year, when Vitalik Buterin, delivered a sharp reality check to the broader ecosystem: “You are not scaling Ethereum.” The comment cut through what had, until then, been a largely celebratory conversation around rollups. These types of networks, also known as layer-2 (L2) networks, process transactions off Ethereum and then bundle them back onto the main chain to make it faster and cheaper. Layer-2 networks have exploded over the last few years, transaction fees have come down, and activity has spread—but the deeper question was whether any of this amounted to coherent scaling. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
SOLANA FOUNDATION RELEASES DEVELOPER PLATFORM FOR INSTITUTIONS: The Solana Foundation is launching a new developer platform aimed at making it easier for financial institutions to build blockchain-based products, with early users including Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay. The Solana Developer Platform (SDP), currently available for developers to test, is a toolkit that enables enterprises to create and scale financial applications on Solana without deep crypto infrastructure expertise. The SDP will also integrate AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. The platform bundles services from more than 20 infrastructure providers — spanning custody, compliance, wallets and payments — into a single interface, streamlining what has traditionally been a fragmented process for institutions entering the space. At launch, SDP includes two live modules. The issuance module enables companies to create tokenized deposits, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, while the payments module supports fiat and stablecoin flows, including on- and off-ramps and onchain transactions. A trading module is expected later in 2026. The involvement of traditional payments firms underscores growing institutional interest in blockchain-based settlement. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
BALANCER LABS TO SHUT DOWN: The company that built decentralized finance (DeFi) powerhouse Balancer is closing. Balancer co-founder Fernando Martinelli announced that Balancer Labs, the corporate entity that incubated and funded the decentralized exchange protocol, will be shutting down. The decision comes roughly five months after a v2 exploit in November 2025 that drained approximately $110 million in digital assets, as CoinDesk first reported, including osETH, WETH, and wstETH, the third known security breach for the project and the one that created the legal exposure Martinelli cited as the reason for shutting down BLabs. “BLabs, as a corporate entity, has become a liability rather than an asset to the protocol’s future and is just not sustainable as is without any sources of revenue,” Martinelli wrote in a governance forum post. Martinelli added he “seriously considered” shutting everything down entirely. But he stopped short of calling for a full wind-down because the protocol still generates revenue. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
BITCOIN MINING CONCENTRATION TRIGGERS SMALL ‘REORG’: Bitcoin’s mining concentration problem just showed up on the blockchain itself, triggering a small “reorg.” At the center of the story is Foundry USA, the largest bitcoin mining pool, representing a group of miners who combine their computing power to verify transactions, mine blocks, and split the rewards in BTC. On the blockchain, there are many miners, and sometimes two or more find a block at nearly the same time. When that happens, the network temporarily has two competing versions of the blockchain. Eventually, the network reorganizes back into a single chain, depending on which version grows faster. This process is called a blockchain reorganization, or “reorg.” That’s what happened earlier this week: Foundry and AntPool both mined blocks at roughly the same time, causing a chain split. Foundry then produced several consecutive blocks, moving slightly faster than its competitors, and became the chain the network followed. The result: the blockchain reorganized to Foundry’s version, and the blocks mined by AntPool and ViaBTC were orphaned or effectively erased from the ledger. Those miners earned nothing for the work they had done. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
In Other News
- The New York Stock Exchange (ICE) is teaming up with tokenization specialist Securitize to help design the infrastructure behind tokenized securities trading. Securitize is aiming to go public this year via a SPAC deal with Cantor Equitize Partners (CEPT). CEPT shares are higher by 6% premarket. ICE shares are flat. The two firms signed a memorandum of understanding to build NYSE’s planned Digital Trading Platform. Securitize will serve as a design partner, focusing on how transfer agents — the entities that track ownership and handle corporate actions — operate when securities are issued and settled on blockchain rails. Securitize, backed by large asset managers like BlackRock and Ark Invest and registered with the SEC as a transfer agent, is expected to be among the first firms eligible to mint tokenized versions of stocks and ETFs on the platform, subject to regulatory approvals. The firm’s broker-dealer arm could also take part in trading, giving it a foothold across both issuance and market activity. The move comes as traditional exchange behemoths like NYSE and Nasdaq are doubling down on tokenization efforts to bring blockchain rails into stock trading. — Kristzian Sandor Read more.
- BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink used his annual letter to shareholders to argue that digital assets and tokenization could help update the financial system, even as he warned that the U.S. economic model is leaving too many people behind. In the letter, Fink said the current system has delivered most of its gains to people who already own assets, while many workers have been shut out of market growth. He tied that imbalance to a wider problem in the U.S., where rising inequality, high government debt and weak participation in capital markets are putting pressure on the old model of finance. “Capitalism is working—just not for enough people,” Fink wrote. His proposed fix centered on tokenization and digital distribution as tools to expand access to investing and make markets run better. Tokenization, Fink said, could “update the plumbing of the financial system” by making investments easier to issue, trade and access. The idea is simple: If ownership of assets is recorded on digital ledgers, moving a fund share, bond or other security could become faster and cheaper. In practice, that would allow a regulated digital wallet to hold not just payments, but also tokenized bonds, ETFs and fractional interests in assets such as infrastructure or private credit. — Helene Braun Read more.
Regulatory and Policy
- Crypto industry insiders got their first look at the revised market structure bill in the Senate, and the opening impression was that the language on allowable stablecoin yield was overly narrow and unclear, according to a person familiar with the current draft. The new language, which was announced Friday by Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Thom Tillis, would ban yield payments for simply holding a stablecoin. It would also restrict any approach that makes the program equivalent to a bank deposit, and it imposes further limits on other potentially allowed activities, the person said, adding that the mechanics of determining activities-based stablecoin rewards remain uncertain. The crypto industry got its first look at the revised section of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act earlier this week during a closed-door review on Capitol Hill in Washington, an attempt to clear a roadblock to getting a hearing in the Senate Banking Committee. Bankers had insisted that stablecoin rewards look nothing like interest-bearing bank deposits, because they argued the competing product could hamstring the industry and strangle lending. So, the compromise will allow rewards programs for users’ stablecoin activities but not balances. — Jesse Hamilton Read more.
- Brazil’s new finance minister, Dario Durigan, is expected to delay a public consultation on applying a tax on financial operations, locally known as Imposto sobre Operações Financeiras (IOF), to some cryptocurrency transactions, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Durigan took office on March 20 after Fernando Haddad stepped down to run for governor of São Paulo. Reuters said the new minister wants to focus on microeconomic measures and avoid proposals that could trigger conflict with Congress during an election year. The postponed consultation centered on a draft decree that could classify some crypto transactions as foreign exchange operations. — Francisco Rodrigues Read more.
Calendar
- Mar. 24-26, 2026: Digital Asset Summit, New York City
- Mar. 30-Apr. 2, 2026: EthCC, Cannes
- Apr.15-16, 2026: Paris Blockchain Week, Paris
- May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami
- Sept. 29-Oct.1, 2026: Korea Blockchain Week, Seoul
- Oct. 7-8, 2026: Token2049, Singapore
- Nov. 3-6, 2026: Devcon, Mumbai
- Nov. 15-17, 2026: Solana Breakpoint, London
The integration gives DeFi protocols direct access to institutional-grade order book, spot, and futures data from the largest US crypto exchange.
Coinbase has integrated Chainlink’s DataLink service to publish its premium exchange data onchain for the first time, the companies announced on Tuesday.
DataLink is an institutional-grade data publishing service powered by the Chainlink data standard. Through the integration, DeFi protocols can now access a range of Coinbase’s datasets directly onchain, including order book data, spot prices, perpetual futures data from Coinbase International Exchange, e-mini futures data, and additional datasets spanning crypto, metals, energy, and equity futures via Coinbase Derivatives Exchange.
The data is designed to power more accurate pricing, stronger risk management, and new onchain market types, from derivatives and perpetuals to tokenized real-world assets, structured products, and next-generation lending protocol risk engines.
“We’re excited to build on our existing Chainlink integrations by adopting DataLink to publish Coinbase’s exchange market data onchain for the first time,” said Liz Martin, Vice President of Coinbase Markets. “Our benchmarks enable DeFi and TradFi developers to build more robust onchain apps across derivatives, tokenized assets, and more.”
The DataLink adoption expands an existing relationship. Coinbase’s Base-Solana bridge is secured by Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and Coinbase selected CCIP as its exclusive interoperability provider for all Coinbase Wrapped Assets. Previously, Coinbase also integrated the Chainlink standard into its Project Diamond institutional tokenization platform.
“Coinbase bringing its exchange data onchain through Chainlink sends a clear signal,” said Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs. “We are proving that the future of finance requires a foundation of uncompromising security.”
Coinbase is the latest in a series of major DataLink adopters. FTSE Russell and the TSX Venture Exchange have also tapped the service to bring their market data onchain.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
US President Donald Trump announced the appointment of 13 members from the crypto, blockchain, AI, and technology industries to his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, re-established by executive order in January 2025.
In a Wednesday notice, the White House said that the council would include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison, and others from major tech companies.
According to the White House, the council could have up to 24 members, many of whom “will be appointed in the near future.”
The council will be co-chaired by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and Trump’s science advisor Michael Kratsios. According to the January executive order re-establishing the council under Trump, it will “advise the President on matters involving science, technology, education, and innovation policy.”
Many of the tech industry representatives have a history of supporting the Trump administration. Huang has previously met with the president to discuss export controls for Nvidia’s chips, while Zuckerberg traveled to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in November 2024 after his election win and attended a White House dinner with other executives from tech companies in September 2025.
Related: SEC’s top enforcer clashed over Trump cases before quitting: Report
The appointment of the council’s members came less than a week after the White House released a national AI framework, calling on Congress to pass legislation that will preempt state-level laws. Trump has been pushing Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act — legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote — saying on March 8 that he “will not sign other bills” until it passes.
No timeline on market structure bill in US Congress
Since a comprehensive digital asset market structure bill, called the CLARITY Act, passed the House of Representatives in July 2025, the Senate has faced several setbacks stalling progress on the legislation. From scheduled recesses, to government shutdowns, to industry concerns over stablecoin yield, progress on moving the bill forward was nowhere to be seen.
The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version of the market structure bill in January, but a markup in the Senate Banking Committee — essential to address implications on securities laws and regulations — was postponed after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company could not support the bill as written. As of Wednesday, the committee had not announced a new date for the markup.
Magazine: The dirty secret about quantum signatures: No one knows if they work
Crypto World
Sky-backed Obex spreads $1 billion across credit, energy and AI assets to expand stablecoin yield
Obex, the Framework Ventures-backed incubator, began deploying $1 billion on Wednesday to link the Sky ecosystem’s USDS stablecoin with income from tangible assets like AI data centers, housing and energy, boosting real-world strategies beyond crypto-native sources of yield.
The first group of assets includes products from Maple, USD.ai, Daylight, Centrifuge, Securitize, River, TVL Capital and Better. Each aims to bridge crypto markets with parts of the real economy, including lending, housing finance, energy and AI infrastructure, often by turning those assets into blockchain-based instruments via tokenization.
The firms will work with Obex to add new tokenized products designed to generate yield and increase USDS use across their platforms. They will also work to develop and roll out new yield-generating tokenized assets.
Sky, one of the oldest decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols and issuer of the $10 billion USDS, is trying to move past the closed loops that have long defined crypto lending. The protocol brought in $435 million in annualized revenue in 2025 and plans to push the dollar-pegged stablecoin’s supply above $20 billion next year.
Obex is aiming to help Sky get there by plugging new sources of income into the system. Last year, it obtained a mandate to allocate up to $2.5 billion of Sky’s USDS reserves into real-world assets to generate yield.
“We’re moving beyond circular DeFi yield sources and toward high-quality yield from structured credit markets, fintech, energy infrastructure, AI CapEx, real estate, and other productive sectors,” said Parker Edwards, a partner at Framework Ventures.
The push reflects a broader shift toward tokenization, in which assets such as loans, funds, or infrastructure projects are represented on blockchain networks. Proponents say this can make it easier to move capital, track ownership and open access to a wider pool of investors.
The market for tokenized real-world assets is growing rapidly, and tripled in value to $26 billion in the past year, RWA.xyz data shows. That growth has been driven by demand for more stable and predictable returns than those typically found in crypto lending and other speculative strategies.
Bitcoin (BTC) price struggled to break above $72,000, as several key onchain metrics highlighted weakening demand for BTC, casting doubts on its upside potential.
Key takeaways:
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Bitcoin investors shift to distribution as whales and smaller cohorts aggressively sell under weak market conditions.
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Bitcoin whale transaction count hits multi-year lows, as smart money waits for policy and geopolitical clarity.
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Bitcoin’s hash rate fell sharply amid rising energy costs, increasing chances of miner capitulation.
Bitcoin investors “shift to distribution”
Bitcoin investors have are increasingly risk-off, distributing their BTC holdings amid the recent price weakness fueled by the US and Israel-Iran war and other macroeconomic headwinds.
Glassnode’s Accumulation Trend Score (ATS) is near zero (light yellow), indicating that the whales are distributing their BTC holdings or not accumulating.
Related: Bitcoin retakes $71K as US sends Iran 15-point ceasefire plan
The drop in the trend score indicates a transition from accumulation to distribution across almost all cohorts. This shift mirrors a similar pattern observed in early 2025, which aligned with Bitcoin’s drop to $74,500 in April 2025.
Additional data from Glassnode shows a “shift toward distribution or inactivity” among small to mid-sized entities holding less than 1,000 BTC.
This is in contrast to “Q4 2024, where broad cohort accumulation preceded a sustained rally,” the onchain data provider said in a Tuesday post on X, adding:
“Heavy participation across wallet sizes remains a precondition for any durable recovery.”
Bitcoin whale activity “historically quiet”
Reflecting this distribution or inactive accumulation trend is Bitcoin’s whale activity, which has become “historically quiet,” according to Santiment.
Last week, daily BTC transactions above $100,000 fell to just 6,417, the lowest since September 2023. Meanwhile, transfers exceeding $1 million dropped to 1,485, levels last seen in October 2024.
The declining whale activity is largely due to market participants waiting for “clarity from the CLARITY Act,” as well as a long-term solution to the war, according to the data analytics company.
This indicates that “smart money is reluctant to make moves with so much policy and global uncertainty at play,” Santiment added.
Declining Bitcoin network activity
Bitcoin’s inability to sustain the recovery is further evidenced by low network activity and less onchain demand.
CryptoQuant’s Bitcoin network activity index, which tracks key indicators such as daily active addresses, total transactions count, and UTXO count, has been declining since August 2025.
This points to “weaker demand across the network,” CryptoQuant analyst Maartunn said in a recent post on X.
This aligns with weak onchain fundamentals such as liquidity and network growth as tracked by Bitcoin Vector’s fundamental index.
This metric “keeps trending lower and remains well below the strengthening zone,” Bitcoin Vector said in a Tuesday X post.
The onchain data provider described the current market conditions as “stability without support,” rather than a healthy consolidation, adding:
“As long as onchain conditions stay weak, upside looks increasingly dependent on flow, short covering, or external catalysts, not organic strength. If fundamentals don’t recover, this kind of divergence usually doesn’t support a sustained mid-term recovery.”
Bitcoin mining hash rate drops 22%
Bitcoin’s hash rate, a metric that shows the level of mining activity, has dropped sharply over the last couple of weeks, meaning miners are shutting down machines.
The hash rate has fallen to 813 EH/s on Wednesday, from 1.2 ZH/s on March 5, representing a 22% decrease.
Rising energy costs, exacerbated by the US and Israel-Iran war, compressed the hash price below $34 per PH/s/day, which is below many miners’ breakeven levels.
“Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every coin they produce, and difficulty just dropped 7.8% as the miner exodus accelerates,” analysts at Token Metrics said in a recent post on X, adding:
“If difficulty drops another 5%+ within the next 7 days, miner capitulation is accelerating and spot sell pressure will intensify.”
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
Startale Group said it closed a $63 million Series A round, adding $50 million from SBI Group to a $13 million first close from Sony Innovation Fund in January.
The Singapore-based company, which operates in Japan, builds blockchain tools for both financial firms and retail users. Its products include Strium, a blockchain for tokenized securities and other real-world assets, yen stablecoin JPYSC, dollar stablecoin USDSC and the Startale app, a consumer app tied to Sony-backed layer-2 network Soneium.
The funding brings together Startale’s two most important strategic partners, the firm said. SBI has worked with the company on Strium and JPYSC, while Sony has backed Startale through its investment arm and its work on Soneium.
The round reflects Startale’s push to build across several layers of the onchain economy, from financial infrastructure and settlement tools to end-user applications.
Startale said it will use the funding to scale Strium for tokenized securities and real-world asset trading, expand adoption of JPYSC and USDSC and develop the Startale app into a broader platform for asset management, payments and onchain services to become a “SuperApp.”
CEO Sota Watanabe said the company will also use the funding to push tokenized stocks tied to Japanese equities and expand yen stablecoin adoption this year.
The round lands as Japan works to test how blockchain systems can connect to existing financial infrastructure. Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said earlier this year she fully supports crypto trading integration into the country’s stock exchanges.
Crypto World
Ripple Partners with Singapore’s Central Bank on Cross-Border Settlement Infra for Trade Finance
The pilot is part of a broader MAS initiative to extend settlement capabilities using tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins.
Ripple has joined a pilot program run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), partnering with trade finance platform Unloq to build blockchain-based cross-border settlement infrastructure, according to a press release today, March 25.
The pilot will leverage Unloq’s trade finance platform, which bundles trade obligations, settlement conditions, and financing workflows into a single execution layer, alongside Ripple’s XRP Ledger and its enterprise-focused stablecoin, RLUSD. The pilot is part of BLOOM — short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency — a MAS initiative to extend settlement capabilities using tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins. MAS is both Singapore’s central bank and primary financial regulator.
The use case targets a persistent inefficiency in global trade: payments that must be released only when predefined commercial conditions — like shipment verification — are confirmed, according to the release. Ripple says the structure improves risk transparency and could open up financing access for small and medium sized businesses caught in cross-border settlement limbo.
“Singapore continues to take a leading role globally in providing the regulatory clarity necessary for the digital asset space to thrive,” said Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for the Asia Pacific region.
Singapore is known for having one of the earliest and most robust crypto-specific regulatory frameworks globally. The Defiant previously covered how MAS finalized its stablecoin regulatory framework back in August 2023, which requires issuers to peg to a single G10 currency and maintain full reserve backing — conditions RLUSD is designed to meet.
As The Defiant reported, RLUSD crossed $1 billion in circulating supply late last year, and the stablecoin’s supply now sits at $1.43 billion. Last August, Ripple acquired stablecoin infrastructure platform Rail for $200 million to bolster its payments ecosystem. In October, the firm completed its acquisition of global prime broker Hidden Road in October, which it rebranded to Ripple Prime.
The company has been pushing RLUSD into enterprise rails across multiple jurisdictions, including a partnership with OpenPayd to enable euro and sterling cross-border flows.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., March 23, 2026.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Citrini Research, the firm that rattled markets earlier this year with a provocative bearish call on artificial intelligence, is out with another warning — this time arguing an oil-driven slowdown could send equities lower.
Founder James van Geelen said persistently high energy prices risk weighing on consumers and corporate earnings, creating a backdrop where stocks struggle even as the Federal Reserve eventually pivots toward rate cuts.
“If the war doesn’t end, equities will go lower,” van Geelen wrote in a Substack post early Wednesday, pointing to geopolitical tensions as a key driver of sustained oil strength.
Stocks recouped some of the losses Wednesday following reports that the U.S. has given Iran a plan to bring the conflict to an end, sending crude prices tumbling. However, the two countries appear to be very far apart, with Tehran turning down the U.S.’s ceasefire offer and demanding sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.
The latest call builds on Citrini’s growing reputation for contrarian macro views. In February, the firm published a widely circulated note arguing that the AI boom itself could ultimately hurt the economy, pushing unemployment as high as 10% if white-collar jobs are replaced by machines.
Slowdown ahead?
The core of Citrini’s current thesis is that elevated oil prices act as a tax on growth, eroding purchasing power and tightening financial conditions without the Fed needing to take further action. With policy rates already near neutral, van Geelen argued that simply holding rates steady would be restrictive enough as the energy shock filters through the economy.
“We live in a different world now, rates are close to neutral,” he wrote. “If oil stays high, it would be restrictive enough simply to leave them where they are while oil prices filter through the rest of the economy and cause a slowdown.”
That dynamic leaves equities particularly vulnerable, he said. Even in a scenario where geopolitical tensions ease quickly, Citrini sees limited upside for stocks. Consumers would still emerge “slightly weaker” after absorbing higher fuel costs, dampening the strength of any rebound, he said.
The firm’s view also challenges a common bullish narrative that rate cuts would provide a backstop for equities. Instead, van Geelen suggests any eventual easing would likely come in response to deteriorating growth, a backdrop historically associated with further equity declines rather than sustained rallies.
“The Fed knows that raising rates isn’t going to magically make more oil supply,” he wrote, arguing policymakers are more likely to “look through” the shock before ultimately cutting rates as conditions worsen.
The Solana Foundation is positioning the network as core infrastructure for an emerging “agentic” internet, where AI systems—not humans—initiate and execute economic activity.
“AI is not really a vertical. It’s a platform shift… affecting everything across every industry, including crypto,” said Vibhu Norby, chief product officer of the Solana Foundation, during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York.
At the center of Solana’s strategy is payments. Norby said the network has already “processed 15 million payments onchain from agents,” largely tied to machine-to-machine commerce. “The programmatic aspect of crypto payments is what is making it interesting for agents,” he said, adding that “stablecoins are going to be the default thing that agents use to pay for any computational resource.”
This shift could fundamentally reshape internet business models, Norby believes. “Agentic payments are probably going to change the entire way that the internet is monetized,” he said, pointing to the ability to support sub-cent, pay-per-use transactions that traditional rails cannot handle.
The Solana Foundation argues that the network’s performance-focused design gives it an edge in this new paradigm. “Agents are cold, calculated machines… they don’t subscribe to crypto religiosity,” Norby said. “If you ask an agent what’s the best way to pay for something with crypto, most of the time, Solana is showing up at the top.”
At the same time, advances in AI are eroding long-standing developer barriers, noting that tools now allow developers and machines to build across ecosystems more easily.
In response, Solana developers are building directly for AI systems. “What agents like is APIs and documentation and skills,” Norby said, pointing to initiatives like machine-readable “skill” files and AI-first developer platforms.
Looking ahead, Norby expects a dramatic shift in user behavior: “The default way people will interact with crypto is going to be through their agent… 95 to 99% of all transactions… will be coming from LLMs.”
Read more: Solana Foundation taps Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay for institutional developer platform
CoinMarketCap dropped a wordless rocket meme just as its own Fear & Greed Index bounced from extreme fear and Bitcoin ripped from $67k back toward $71k.
Summary
- CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) posted a single rocket emoji alongside a stylized AI-generated rocket-shaped lava lamp image on March 24.
- The post came exactly one day after CoinMarketCap’s own Crypto Fear & Greed Index hit 8 out of 100 — deep in “extreme fear” territory — as traders aggressively dumped XRP, Solana, and DeFi positions amid geopolitical anxiety and macro pressure.
- The broader market context was significant: Bitcoin (BTC) had just surged from a recent low of $67,000 back toward $71,000 on March 24.
CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap), one of the world’s most widely cited cryptocurrency data platforms with over 70 million monthly users, posted a wordless bullish signal on March 24 at 4:00 PM UTC — a rocket emoji and an AI-generated image of a metallic, rocket-shaped lava lamp — at the precise moment sentiment across crypto markets was attempting to reverse from some of its deepest fear readings in years. The post accumulated 34,500 views, 598 likes, and 75 retweets, becoming one of the most-engaged posts in crypto’s trending feed that day.
The timing was pointed. Just 24 hours earlier, CoinMarketCap’s own Crypto Fear & Greed Index had printed at 8 out of 100, locking in one of the deepest “extreme fear” readings of the current cycle, as traders liquidated positions across major altcoins including Solana (SOL) and XRP (XRP). The broader total crypto market capitalization had held around $2.36 trillion even as investors rotated aggressively into cash and stablecoins.
The fear had been building for months. As crypto.news reported in February, the Fear & Greed Index plunged to a yearly low of 5 on Feb. 6 — a level not seen since the depths of 2022 — as the global crypto market cap shed roughly $2 trillion from its 2025 peak. By mid-March, sentiment had crept back toward neutral. But a fresh wave of geopolitical anxiety around Iran dragged it back toward single digits.
The catalyst for the reversal was geopolitical rather than on-chain. U.S. President Donald Trump signaled a pause in military escalations against Iran on March 24, opening the door to diplomatic talks. The announcement triggered an immediate “risk-on” rotation across financial markets. Bitcoin, which had dipped to approximately $67,000 in the preceding days, climbed nearly 4% to breach $71,000 — recovering its market capitalization toward $1.33 trillion, according to Fortune. The wider crypto market cap moved to approximately $2.44 trillion, per CoinMarketCap data, with BTC dominance still elevated at close to 58%.
It was into this precise inflection point that CoinMarketCap chose to post its rocket image. The platform, described in its own documentation as “the Home Of Crypto” and the operator of what it calls “the most trusted” sentiment gauge in mainstream financial media, offered no caption beyond a single emoji. The community read the signal clearly: @DogelonMars replied “Comfy in spot,” while @CaptainBNB_bsc wrote “It’s mesmerizing, I could watch it all day.”
CoinMarketCap’s Fear & Greed Index runs on a 0–100 scale and draws from five data pillars: price momentum across the top 10 non-stablecoin assets, volatility measures on Bitcoin and Ethereum, options put/call ratios, stablecoin supply ratios, and CMC’s proprietary social trend data. CoinMarketCap itself states that “extreme fear likely indicates undervalued asset prices” — and by its own measure, markets had been in that territory for weeks.
Whether the rocket post marks an inflection or a head-fake remains to be seen. But as a sentiment artifact, it captured something real: after months of fear, the data’s own publisher was finally reaching for the launch button.
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