• MEXC unveils EMBLEM Launchpool with 5,000,000 tokens in rewards.
• Four staking pools including exclusive new-user EMBLEM pool.
• Users can boost rewards by increasing trading volume thresholds.

MEXC, the world leader in 0‑fee digital asset trading, will launch the EMBLEM Launchpool, running from April 15 to May 15, 2026 (13:00 UTC). Participants can stake eligible tokens during the event period to share a total of 5,000,000 EMBLEM in airdrop rewards.

The Launchpool features four staking pools. The EMBLEM Staking Pool is exclusive to new users, offering a total of 1,500,000 EMBLEM in rewards.

The MX Staking Pool, USD1 Staking Pool, and BTC Staking Pool are open to all users, offering 1,500,000 EMBLEM, 1,000,000 EMBLEM, and 1,000,000 EMBLEM in rewards, respectively.

Participants can further increase their share of rewards through MEXC’s staking limit boost mechanism.

By meeting designated trading volume thresholds during the event period, users can boost their maximum staking limit by up to 100%.

MEXC Launchpool is an event platform that enables users to earn airdrops of popular or newly listed tokens by staking designated tokens, with staked tokens remaining redeemable at any time.

The most recent USD1 Launchpool attracted nearly 2,000 users with a total staking volume exceeding 35 million USD1.

The EMBLEM Launchpool reflects MEXC’s commitment to providing users with accessible opportunities to engage with emerging digital assets.

Looking ahead, MEXC plans to continue rolling out diverse Launchpool events, bringing users more opportunities to discover and participate in quality projects.

Furthermore, MEXC continues to strengthen its position as a universal gateway for global markets, built on the core pillars of “0 Fees” and “Infinite Opportunities”, with a commitment to lowering trading costs and expanding market access for users worldwide.

To learn more and participate in the event, visit the MEXC Launchpool page.

About MEXC

MEXC is the world’s fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchange, trusted by more than 40 million users across 170+ markets.

Built on a user-first philosophy, MEXC offers industry-leading 0-fee trading and access to over 3,000 digital assets.

As the Gateway to Infinite Opportunities, MEXC provides a single platform where users can easily trade cryptocurrencies alongside tokenized assets, including stocks, ETFs, commodities, and precious metals.

MEXC Official Website｜ X ｜ Telegram ｜How to Sign Up on MEXC

For media inquiries, please contact MEXC PR team: [email protected]

Risk Disclaimer:

This content does not constitute investment advice. Given the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, investors are encouraged to carefully assess market fluctuations, project fundamentals, and potential financial risks before making any trading decisions.

Source

This article is authored by a third party, and CoinJournal does not endorse or take responsibility for its content, accuracy, quality, advertisements, products, or materials. Readers should independently research and exercise due diligence before making decisions related to the mentioned company.

Some 572 bitcoin worth $42.77 million moved from a Gemini hot wallet into wallets owned by Winklevoss Capital and custody wallets in the past 24 hours, according to Arkham Intelligence data, the first significant transfers into the fund’s addresses in over a month.

The transfers came in two batches. One of 372 BTC and one of 200 BTC about 11 hours later. Both moved from addresses tagged by Arkham as belonging to the crypto exchange to addresses tagged as Winklevoss Capital and Gemini Custody.

Winklevoss Capital now holds 9,328 BTC worth $689 million across 128 tracked addresses, up from about 8,800 BTC after a $128.5 million deposit into Gemini roughly a month ago that brought holdings to their lowest level since 2012.

It also holds 70,588 ETH worth $163.7 million, bringing its total tracked portfolio to approximately $853 million, the Arkham data show.

The onchain data shows the direction of movement, not the intent. The transfers could reflect new purchases, internal rebalancing between Gemini’s exchange and custody infrastructure, or a partial reversal of last month’s deposit.

Gemini Space Station (GEMI), founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, has faced mounting financial pressure this year.

Bloomberg reported last week that the company has lost more than half its market value in 2026, cut 30% of its workforce and exited markets including the U.K., EU, and Australia.

The Winklevoss brothers have roughly $330 million in outstanding bitcoin-denominated loans to the company, and one idea being discussed internally involves converting that debt into equity, Bloomberg said.

Yesterday, CoinDesk flagged the potential for heightened bitcoin BTC$74,003.49 price volatility around the $75,000 level, and that scenario is playing out. After briefly approaching $76,000 late Tuesday, the largest cryptocurrency has pulled back to trade near $73,900.

The move may be partly driven by market makers rebalancing their exposure, adding to short-term price volatility.

For now, the market remains anchored to familiar themes: the U.S.–Iran peace talks, a fading geopolitical risk premium and the persistent $75,000 resistance level. A sustained extension of the recent rebound depends on bitcoin decisively breaking and holding above this threshold.

“The level map is clean. $75K is both the milestone and the ceiling. If we clear and hold above it, the range finally breaks and the move can extend. If we fail again, it becomes a magnet—triggering profit-taking and pulling the market back into choppy conditions,” crypto analysts at Marex noted.

Major altcoins, including XRP (XRP), ether (ETH), and solana (SOL), appear to be feeling the impact of bitcoin’s inability to sustain its gains. Each is down 2% or more over the past 24 hours.

The outlook for the ether-bitcoin ratio, however, is improving, supported by a surge in Ethereum’s onchain activity. The ratio climbed to 0.032 on Tuesday, the highest level since Jan. 31.

Among smaller-cap tokens, DEXE, M, and GT have emerged as the top gainers over the past day, while HASH, WLD and privacy-focused ZEC are the leading losers.

Derivatives positioning

• Exchanges have liquidated $424 million in crypto futures positions due to margin shortages. Notably, the liquidations were almost evenly split between long (bullish) and short (bearish) bets, a rare occurrence that highlights the current uncertainty and lack of direction in the market.
• There are no clear signs that traders are actively shorting bitcoin’s pullback from $76,000. This is reflected in open interest across major dollar- and USDT-denominated futures, which fell to 256K BTC from 267.48K BTC as the price dropped. This combination points to unwinding of positions rather than the buildup of fresh bearish bets.
• Futures tied to XRP, ETH, and SOL display a similar dynamic.
• Open interest in crude oil futures on Binance fell by 12%, suggesting that concerns over a war-driven energy shortage are easing rapidly and speculative positioning is unwinding. This is supportive of risk assets, including bitcoin.
• Futures tied to MemeCore’s M token look overheated, with annualized funding rates jumping to nearly 70%. It points to overcrowding in bullish bets, which often leads to a squeeze on longs and a rapid price slide.
• The opposite is true for futures linked to RaveDAO’s RAVE token, where traders are piling on bearish bets.
• Short-duration ether options are back to favoring puts or downside protection. The so-called skew had flipped slightly bullish on Tuesday. Bitcoin puts remain pricier relative to calls across all time frames.

Token talk

• Blockchain-powered rave and entertainment project RaveDAO’s RAVE token is showing signs of weakness after a surge that lifted its market cap to $4.75 billion from $65 million in a week.
• The market cap was down at $3.4 billion as of writing, a 5% drop in 24 hours.
• The decline comes as perpetual funding rates stay deeply negative, pointing to overcrowding in bearish short positions. Should prices begin rising again, these shorts may throw in the towel, adding to the upward momentum.
• The initial rally was fueled by a similar short-squeeze dynamic. Experts argue that wallets associated with team members, who control over 90% of the token supply, moved large amount of coins to exchanges, creating an illusion of an impending sell pressure. This lured traders to take bearish short positions in large numbers.
• Later those coins were withdrawn just as quickly, engineering a price rally that triggered unwinding of short bets on the way higher.
• The market for this token remains highly illiquid, indicating scope for wild price moves in either direction.

Bitcoin 2026 has published a 400-name speaker roster for its upcoming megaconference this month. But despite a history of promoting the industry’s largest annual gathering as exclusively about bitcoin (BTC), many of these speakers have promoted a dubious variety of digital assets.

Protos reviewed the list and found dozens of speakers with documented promotions of non-BTC digital assets, many of which have, unsurprisingly, declined in value disastrously.

Last year, Protos documented a similar pattern at Bitcoin 2025 where attendees learned not only about BTC but also QI, ZEUS, YU, SUI, CORE, FXS, QBTC, TRX, BTT, SUN, JST, USDJ, MAG7, MEME, DEFI, USSI, WBTC, HUSD, USDD, IQ, and others.

This year, altcoin promoters will migrate from expo floor booths to speaking stages where they’ll probably spend most of their time talking about BTC.

Below are some details of the aforementioned altcoin promotions. Note that this list excludes stocks of so-called digital asset treasury companies, including their BTC-only variants, which have also mostly declined in value.

For example, the stock price of Bitcoin 2026 speaker Adam Back’s H100 Group is down 69% over the past 12 months. Over the same time period, Jack Mallers’ Twenty One Capital is down 31%, David Bailey’s Nakamoto is down 85%, Simon Gerovich’s Metaplanet is down 10%, and Michael Saylor and Phong Le’s Strategy is down 55%.

Eric Trump among Bitcoin 2026 altcoin shills

Donald Trump’s son Eric, who has repeatedly urged his X followers to buy ether (ETH), will be speaking on the Bitcoin 2026 main stage this month. Trump also promotes World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token, its USD1 stablecoin, and his father’s Solana-based TRUMP memecoin.

WLFI is down 75% from its high last year, and TRUMP is down 96%.

Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief executive, told Fortune that his flagship stablecoin USDT represents “the last stronghold for US dollar hegemony out there.”

He’s promoted XAUT, MXNT, XAUT, and his company’s new USAT stablecoin. None of those tokens use Bitcoin as their primary blockchain.

Last year, Arthur Hayes predicted ETH would reach “$10,000 to $20,000 before the end of the cycle,” which certainly never happened. He’s also repeatedly endorsed Ethena’s ENA token, including a call for it to reach $10. 

In reality, ENA’s all-time high was $1.52, and it’s trading 93% lower today.

TLDR:

• Ripple partners with Kyobo Life Insurance, Korea’s third-largest insurer managing $88B in assets.
  
• Ripple Custody will cut bond settlement from two days to near real-time on a live blockchain testnet.
  
• The partnership explores stablecoin payment rails enabling 24/7 transactions within a regulated framework.
  
• Ripple signals a long-term Korea strategy, using the Kyobo deal as a blueprint for future engagements.

Ripple has announced a strategic partnership with Kyobo Life Insurance, one of South Korea’s largest life insurers. The collaboration will tokenize government bond settlements through blockchain technology using Ripple Custody.

Kyobo manages approximately $88 billion in assets and ranks as the country’s third-largest life insurer. The two firms will replace manual bond settlement processes with transparent on-chain execution. This marks Ripple’s first major tie-up with a Korean insurance institution.

Ripple Custody Targets Faster, Safer Bond Settlement

The partnership centers on Ripple Custody, a bank-grade digital asset custody platform built for regulated institutions. It supports the secure transfer, settlement, and management of tokenized assets on-chain.

The platform moves bond transactions away from fragmented, manual processes toward streamlined blockchain execution. This directly addresses inefficiencies in Korea’s existing government bond settlement framework.

A proof-of-concept launched in September 2025 and has since entered a live testnet phase. The primary goal is to reduce the standard two-day settlement cycle to near real-time.

Faster settlement reduces counterparty risk and improves capital efficiency for institutional players. These gains are particularly relevant for large asset managers like Kyobo.

Fiona Murray, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Ripple, addressed the broader market meaning of the deal. She said, “Korea’s institutional financial market is at an inflection point, and we are privileged to be entering it alongside Kyobo Life Insurance.”

Murray added that Kyobo is the first major insurer in the country to take this step with Ripple. She further noted that institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure is “available, proven, and ready to deploy in Korea today.”

Murray also reinforced Ripple’s long-term commitment to the Korean market. She said, “We see this as the beginning of a broad and enduring partnership, not only with Kyobo, but with the Korean institutional financial market as a whole.”

This positions the Kyobo deal as an entry point rather than a standalone engagement. Ripple is signaling clear intent to deepen its institutional footprint across Korea.

Kyobo Eyes Stablecoins and Operational Transformation

Beyond bond settlement, Ripple will support Kyobo in exploring stablecoin-based payment rails. These rails would enable 24/7 transaction capability within a compliant, regulated framework.

This expands the scope of the partnership well beyond custody and tokenization alone. Stablecoin integration could further modernize Kyobo’s treasury and liquidity management operations.

Kyobo’s Senior Executive Vice President, Jin Ho Park, shared the insurer’s perspective on the collaboration. Park said, “Our partnership with Ripple is not simply about digital assets — it’s about validating how traditional financial instruments can operate securely and efficiently on blockchain.”

He noted the goal is to advance Korea’s financial market infrastructure and deliver next-generation solutions to customers. Park’s statement frames the partnership as a structural shift, not just a technology trial.

Over time, the infrastructure built through this partnership could expand into payments and liquidity management. Ripple has indicated that the Kyobo deal forms part of a broader Korea strategy.

The firm sees potential to work with multiple institutional players across the Korean market. This partnership, therefore, serves as a blueprint for future institutional engagements in the region.

Regulated financial institutions across Korea are watching this proof-of-concept closely. The live testnet outcome will shape wider decisions on blockchain-based settlement adoption.

If successful, it could lead to broader reform of national bond settlement processes. Ripple and Kyobo aim to demonstrate that on-chain settlement is practical and scalable at the institutional level.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s latest macroeconomic warnings paint a picture that could be one of the most consequential and bullish indicators for bitcoin BTC$74,114.19.

At the core of the warning is a steady rise in global public debt, which the IMF has projected could approach 100% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2029 under current trends. It means that every dollar, yuan, pound, euro, yen, rupee, and other currencies earned in a year will be used to pay off government debt.

In other words, by 2029, debt load will have grown to consume the entire global economic output, leaving nothing for additional investments in the economy or in non-economic but socially important causes. Per the IMF, China and the U.S. will continue to drive debt higher, with contributions from a broad swathe of nations as defense spending surges globally.

If annual economic growth is equal to or falls short of the debt raised by issuing government bonds, markets could start questioning the fiscal solvency of sovereigns and thereby demand a higher return (bond yield) for lending to governments.

That’s precisely a scenario in which an asset like bitcoin could stand out. Decentralized, censorship-resistant and beholden to no government or central bank, bitcoin sits entirely outside the the architecture of traditional finance (TradFi).

There is historical precedent for bitcoin attracting a haven bid during periods of stress in TradFi. In 2013, following the Cyprus banking crisis, authorities imposed losses on depositors as part of a bailout. Bitcoin rallied sharply in the months that followed, gaining significantly from pre-crisis levels.

A similar dynamic has been cited more recently during the U.S. regional banking turmoil in early 2023, when stress across several lenders coincided with bitcoin’s recovery from around $25,000 and the start of a broader upward move.

Rising yields

There is, however, the counterargument that rising bond yields would be bearish for BTC.

Bonds pay a fixed yield, which means that every dollar in bitcoin is a dollar not earning guaranteed returns from bonds. That gap is what experts call opportunity cost. It rises as bond yields rise, draining money from riskier assets such as stocks and bitcoin.

We saw this play out from late 2021 and through 2022 as bitcoin crashed to roughly $16,000 from nearly $70,000. The sell-off was at least partly catalyzed by the Fed’s rapid rate hikes to tame inflation, which lifted yields on Treasury notes. Back then, the digital gold narrative evaporated rapidly, and BTC fell alongside technology stocks.

Note that the 2022 surge in yields was due to Fed hikes, not fiscal concerns questioning the government’s solvency.

But the IMF’s latest warning changes the calculus. If global debt rises to 100% of GDP or more, bond markets worldwide could panic and price in concerns about solvency. The resulting yield surge, therefore, may not drain money from other assets, as it usually does.

The impact could be the other way round, with investors parking money in alternative assets such as BTC. The different ways governments typically respond when debt outpaces growth — outgoing debt, spending cuts, raising taxes or allowing inflation to erode the real value of debt over time — all have a damaging impact on real or inflation-adjusted returns from fixed-income investments.

Bitcoin is structurally resilient to all of them with its supply capped at 21 million and no central bank to debase or devalue it.

The IMF warning doesn’t necessarily imply an immediate moonshot for BTC, but it strengthens its long-term appeal and validates the growing institutional holding of the cryptocurrency.

It indicates that the macro backdrop of structurally higher public debt, not just in the U.S., but worldwide, is impossible to ignore.

Austin Federa quit as the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy in 2024 to tackle what he saw as unfairness in the crypto trading environment. Eighteen months later, his company, DoubleZero, says it’s ready.

DoubleZero aims to eliminate proximity to an exchange’s servers as a competitive advantage for traders. The private fiber network removes latency, the time it takes for an order to reach the platform from a trader’s desk, as a factor and introduces a more equitable environment even though regulators — and traders — aren’t asking for it yet.

The problem, Federa says, is that crypto conflates decentralized with distributed. DeFi protocols are decentralized by virtue of their open-source code and permissionless validator sets, but when milliseconds determine who wins a trade, the laws of physics push validators to cluster in the same data centers anyway. On platforms like Hyperliquid, for example, Tokyo-based traders enjoy a roughly 200-millisecond edge over rivals abroad.

“Hyperliquid may be a decentralized system from a governance and user perspective, but it is not a distributed system,” Federa said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It is still co-located in the same environment, even if it’s run by multiple different entities.”

It’s a problem traditional finance has already faced. When the New York Stock Exchange developed its Mahwah, New Jersey data center over a decade ago, it engineered cable-length equalization to within a nanosecond because asymmetric access was bad for business, not because regulators required it. Simply, traders who felt disadvantaged would route their orders elsewhere.

Read more: A former Solana exec is taking a page out of Wall Street playbook to make global crypto trades faster

DoubleZero’s solution is timestamping.

The network aggregates private bandwidth from operators to route blockchain data over dedicated links, while giving venues tools to timestamp orders across global entry points and reconstruct a fair sequence similar in aim to the cable equalization used by the NYSE.

The challenge isn’t just speed, but verifiability. On a venue running over the public internet, a trader whose order arrives late has no way to distinguish ordinary network congestion from something more deliberate.

“Is that true because the public internet drops packets all the time, or is that true because you saw my transaction and said, ‘Hey, this guy’s pretty good, I don’t want to include this block,’” Federa said. “The counter-factual is really hard to prove.”

DoubleZero’s pitch is that a managed network with deterministic latency makes that distinction provable. Physics still applies: A New York trading desk routing through DoubleZero to reach Hyperliquid in Tokyo will not outrun a nearer competitor in AWS’s ap-northeast-1 region.

But the gap shrinks, and more importantly, the variance shrinks. Traders get not just lower latency but predictable latency, which is the property high-frequency trading firms actually pay for in traditional markets.

Federa’s broader point is that crypto is misreading what makes traditional markets fair. Regulators matter, but they’re not the main driver. FINRA, the body that polices most of Wall Street’s day-to-day conduct, is technically a voluntary self-regulatory organization. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission serve as backstops with enforcement teeth, but the day-to-day work of keeping markets fair is done by exchanges themselves.

They do it because their business depends on it. Venues that get a reputation for asymmetric access lose volume to venues that don’t.

If he’s right, DeFi’s latency problem isn’t waiting on regulators. It’s waiting on the moment a major venue decides fairness is a competitive advantage worth paying for.

Crypto has spent a decade proving you can build decentralized systems. The next decade will test whether anyone wants to build distributed ones, where the advantage isn’t based on where in Tokyo your server sits.

“No one wants to trade on an unfair platform,” Federa said.

US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds bounced back to notable daily inflows as Goldman Sachs entered the Bitcoin ETF sector.

Spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs recorded $411.5 million inflows on Tuesday, marking the second-largest daily inflows in April so far, according to SoSoValue data.

The fresh inflows pushed total net flows for 2026 into positive territory at roughly $245 million year-to-date, while total assets under management surged above $96.5 billion, the highest since mid-March.

The gains came as Goldman Sachs, once a major Bitcoin critic, filed with US securities regulators to launch a Bitcoin-linked ETF. The move follows Morgan Stanley’s launch of its Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust ETF (MSBT) last Wednesday.

BlackRock, Morgan Stanley expand inflow streaks

No US spot Bitcoin ETF recorded outflows on Tuesday, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) leading the inflows at roughly $214 million, according to Farside data.

Both IBIT and Morgan Stanley’s MSBT extended their inflow streaks to five days, totaling around $696 million and $84 million, respectively.

The ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) and the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) were among the significant contributors on Tuesday, with inflows of $113 million and $45 million, respectively.

Inflows across all altcoin ETFs, including Dogecoin

The positive trend spread across all US-listed altcoin ETFs on Tuesday, with spot Ether (ETH) ETFs recording $53 million in inflows.

XRP (XRP) funds notably increased inflows at $11 million, while Solana (SOL) saw minor gains of just over $1 million.

Related: Iran conflict hints Bitcoin’s addressable market could exceed gold: Bitwise

The trend also extended to Dogecoin (DOGE) ETFs, which saw around $187,000 inflows, bringing cumulative inflows to around $9.2 million.

While it remains to be seen whether the rebound is sustainable, overall sentiment has slightly improved in recent days, with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index rising above a score of 20 this week.

The price of Bitcoin also hit a multi-week high on Tuesday, briefly rising above $75,000 for the first time since March 17. It later pulled back below $74,000, trading at $73,852 at publishing time, according to CoinGecko.

Magazine: Your guide to surviving this mini-crypto winter