Cryptopolitan

The 2026 IPO market is bracing for the effect of three giants going public – SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Crypto traders see parallels with the ICO trend, especially the period of VC-backed companies.
The 2026 IPO market expects a valuation of up to $3B for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, according to analyst Thomas Tunguz. These valuations create the need to raise between $432B and $576B (for a 20% float).
That raise will put pressure on the liquidity markets, as all three IPOs are expected in a single quarter. The amount needed is higher than all the IPO raises from US companies between 2016 and 2025. The year may also contain other high-profile IPOs, including Kraken, Anduril, and Canva, using the increased interest in new stocks to fulfill their intended raises.
Due to the high valuations, the IPOs will launch with a limited free float, as low as 3-8%. This limitation may create problems with index inclusion and a real market impact.
The upcoming IPOs are valued much higher than previous leaders, Aramco and Alibaba, with SpaceX expected to raise $75B in its initial round.
Is the 2026 IPO market using the crypto playbook?
For years, the crypto space boosted the ICO model, selling tokens in place of stocks. While the model met multiple obstacles, including US Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, it turned out to be a successful direct tool for fundraising. As a result, projects with big promises raised significant sums, securing a long-term runway. The upcoming IPO valuations are also seeking scale to secure the runway for the companies’ ambitious expansion.
Initially, ICOs targeted early adopters, BTC holders, and crypto natives. The second round of ICOs, during the 2021 bull market, changed their way of distributing the token float, often leading to a series of projects with a limited free float and a large share of controlled supply held by insiders.
The market performance of those tokens was a long unraveling of value, leaving retail traders with deep losses, while VC backers used the market as exit liquidity.
SpaceX structured its IPO in a way resembling crypto sales
The SpaceX IPO is showing an internal structure similar to some crypto projects. The expected free float of 5% leaves 95% of shares in the hands of early backers.
While the IPO has a standard 180-day lockup period, up to 20% of the Early Release Eligible shares may be released before that. In its S-1 filing, SpaceX listed the exceptions, allowing the early release to happen a full trading day after the first quarterly results release of SpaceX. The date has not been finalized, but is expected between mid-July and August.
An even earlier release will be possible for early buyers if the post-IPO stock trades at over 30% greater than the IPO price. Those conditions may release an additional 10% of the Early Release Eligible Shares.
What worries investors the most is the rule changes around SpaceX and IPOs in general. Nasdaq will potentially list SpaceX in 15 days, instead of the previously required 90 days. The S&P index waived the profitability requirement, opening the 2026 IPO market to pension funds.
The low float and high valuations may expose those pension funds to over-inflated valuations, using the accumulated $30T of pension fund money. At the same time, IPO stocks have also shown price weakness in the first year of trading.
Based on pre-market trading, SpaceX shows a disparity between its IPO price and market price discovery. SpaceX plans to IPO at $135 per share, while on-chain trading has valued the stock at up to $744.
The coming months will show how liquidity shifts, which may further dry out inflows to the crypto market.
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Hyperliquid processed $10.319 billion in volume yesterday out of the total $20.306 billion across all chains, which equates to just over half of the entire field, according to DeFiLlama. The next chain, at a distant second, was Solana with $5.307 billion while Ethereum and Arbitrum both saw figures below $2 billion.
What really puts things into perspective is the fact that at the start of the year, the split in perp volume across chains was broadly even. The 50.8% volume dominance is being driven by a combination of factors such as letting anyone launch their own perp market via HIP-3 and a wave of institutional products now built around HYPE.
Hyperliquid Now Owns Half the Perp Market
Hyperliquid has spent months pulling perps traders off rival venues, and Tuesday’s print showed how lopsided the gap has become. Beating the rest of the field combined means close to one in every two perp dollars on-chain is now clearing through a single platform.
Why traders keep picking it comes down to how it trades. The order book runs more like Binance than a typical AMM, with fast fills and low fees. Its listings also run wider than what rivals put up. None of this happened overnight. The platform built its base through a long points and airdrop run, then held onto those users once the token went live.
Perps volume moves around between chains depending on what’s trending, and a 50.8% read on a violent liquidation day like yesterday actually shows Hyperliquid absorbing the volatility flow. Ethereum and Arbitrum sitting under $2 billion each only sharpens that stance. The chains that used to be the dominant on-chain derivatives are now fighting over what’s left after Hyperliquid takes its cut.
HYPE Flips Dogecoin and Outruns Bitcoin
HYPE currently trades above $72 and its market cap now stands at over $18 billion. It is now the ninth largest cryptocurrency by market cap after leapfrogging DOGE.
HYPE breaching new highs is taking place during a broader corrective phase for the crypto market. Despite Bitcoin slipping below $67k for the first time this week in close to two months, HYPE has shown incredible relative strength. In fact when we look at HYPE’s performance relative to BTC, over the past month, it has outpaced the largest crypto by over 100%.
The Catalysts Keep Stacking
Grayscale’s HYPG staking ETF is expected to begin trading this week, which would hand traditional money a regulated way to earn yield on HYPE without ever touching the chain.
Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETF (Ticker: $HYPG), the $HYPE ETP with the lowest gross management fee in the U.S.¹, starts trading tomorrow. $HYPE is the asset powering 24/7 onchain markets, with @HyperliquidX driving trillions in perpetual trading volume²
Direct $HYPE… pic.twitter.com/u56CntzEXK
— Grayscale (@Grayscale) June 2, 2026
Spot HYPE ETF inflows have run unbroken for fourteen days since the mid-May launch, a clean streak that’s rare for any product this new.
Wall Street keeps circling, and the reason is simple. Hyperliquid runs 24/7 and lists perps on markets the traditional system won’t go near, from crude oil to pre-IPO names like SpaceX. That kind of access paired with that kind of exposure is hard to find anywhere else, on-chain or off.
The volume crown can flip fast in this market. One heavy day on a rival chain, one quiet stretch from Hyperliquid, and the share drops. For now, Tuesday’s numbers say the lead is real and the rest of the field has a long way to go to catch up.
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Most financial infrastructure was built in markets where payments already work. Bitnob was built in markets where they don’t.
Bitnob has operated at the intersection of some of the world’s most complex financial environments: markets where businesses navigate currency volatility, limited access to dollars, fragmented payment networks, long settlement timelines, and costly cross-border transactions as part of everyday operations.
Today, the company is introducing the next evolution of its infrastructure platform.
Bitnob announced the launch of Bitnob Enterprise, a non-custodial infrastructure stack, alongside the next generation of Bitnob Business, its managed platform for businesses building with modern financial rails.
Together, the two offerings provide businesses with a choice between managed and non-custodial operating models while leveraging the same underlying infrastructure.
“We’ve spent years building infrastructure in environments where financial inefficiency is not an inconvenience but a business risk,” said Bernard Parah, Founder and CEO of Bitnob.
“When your customers deal with currency volatility, delayed settlements, restricted access to global currencies, and expensive cross-border payments, you learn very quickly what matters and what doesn’t. The infrastructure we built to solve those problems is increasingly relevant far beyond the markets where we started.”
Over the last five years, Bitnob has built infrastructure powering wallets-as-a-service, payments, treasury operations, stablecoin settlement, swaps, collections, payouts, and virtual card products used by businesses operating across global markets. Today, more than $4.5 billion has moved through its infrastructure.
First launched in 2022, Bitnob Business provides businesses with access to managed infrastructure via APIs and dashboards, enabling them to launch and scale financial products without managing blockchain infrastructure or internal operational complexity.
The next generation of Bitnob Business introduces a redesigned experience and enhanced infrastructure designed to support growing treasury workflows and operational requirements.
Alongside it, Bitnob Enterprise introduces a non-custodial infrastructure layer for organizations and developers that prefer greater ownership and control over how financial products are built and operated.
Customers using Enterprise retain control of their custody architecture while leveraging Bitnob’s infrastructure for wallets, payments, treasury operations, market intelligence, and embedded financial services. It is available to regulated financial institutions, fintechs, and developers building products that prefer a non-custodial architecture from day one.
The launch comes at a time when businesses across emerging markets are increasingly turning to stablecoin infrastructure to move money more efficiently across borders.
According to a 2025 Oui Capital report, Africa’s cross-border payments corridor is projected to grow from approximately $329 billion annually today to nearly $1 trillion by 2035. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoins now account for roughly 43% of digital asset transaction activity, driven increasingly by practical use cases such as supplier payments, treasury management, payroll, and international commerce.
At the same time, institutional adoption continues to accelerate globally. Stablecoin frameworks are emerging across major jurisdictions, financial institutions are increasing participation, and programmable financial infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important part of the global financial system.
Bitnob believes the future of financial infrastructure will be shaped not by geography, but by utility. As businesses become increasingly global from day one, the demand for infrastructure that is programmable, borderless, and accessible continues to grow.
The same infrastructure that helps a business in Lagos access global markets can help a company in São Paulo manage treasury more efficiently, or enable a fintech company in Nairobi to move money across borders faster and at lower cost.
Bitnob Business and Bitnob Enterprise are available free beginning today. For more information, visit https://bitnob.com/ or schedule a call with the sales team
About Bitnob
Founded in 2020, Bitnob is a financial infrastructure company helping businesses build, move, and manage money globally. Through APIs and managed infrastructure, Bitnob powers wallets-as-a-service, payments, treasury operations, stablecoin settlement, card programs, collections, payouts, and embedded financial services for businesses across global markets.

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Emorya has launched a global campaign targeting 10,000 premium subscribers with luxury rewards before December 31, 2026.
The platform offers Lamborghini, Ferrari, BMW, and iPhone prizes through a public draw system.
Community reacts positively as Emorya shows growing users, activity, and token metrics.
Cryptocurrency rewards platform Emorya launched a global giveaway campaign offering a Lamborghini Huracan to attract 10,000 Premium subscribers. The company announced on X that the campaign will run until December 31, 2026.
Emorya said that users must activate a one-year Premium subscription in the Emorya app to be eligible for a live public draw. Founder and CEO of Emorya, Jurjica Oliviu, is pushing the campaign through X.
Crypto community reacts to Emorya’s ambitious reward structure
🔥 ONE OF THE BIGGEST CAMPAIGNS IN CRYPTO IS NOW LIVE – FULL PRIZES REVEALED! 🔥
⏳ The countdown is on!
🎯 Target: 100,000 Premium subscribers for 1 year
🗓️ Campaign runs until December 31, 2026
🟢 How to join: Become a Premium subscriber in the Emorya app for one year.… pic.twitter.com/RRQTxv73Oq
— Emorya (@EmoryaApp) February 23, 2026
According to Emorya, winners will be selected live through a completely transparent random draw, 100% public and 100% fair.
Emorya organized the giveaway into several incentive levels, with a Lamborghini Huracan awarded to the grand-prize winner. The platform revealed it will give the second-place winner a Ferrari F8 and the third-place competitor a BMW M8. Users who place between fourth and tenth will each receive an iPhone 17 Pro.
The platform further revealed that Lamborghini Huracan, Ferrari F8, BMW M8, and seven iPhone 17 Pro devices are only the first phase of the campaign’s rewards. “More surprises are coming! Bigger announcements. More historic rewards,” Emorya stated in its announcement
Members of the cryptocurrency community also took notice of the initiative. BGXRO Romania’s FansClub Page praised the Emorya Finance team for initiating what it called an “ambitious campaign,” emphasizing the project’s rapid development and increased community involvement despite the market’s state.
Emorya reports growing user base and token metrics
Alongside the campaign, the corporation is showcasing its expanding ecosystem activity. Emorya has 295,493 overall app users and 16,044 weekly active users, according to data shown on the dashboard portal.
The dashboard also shows that over 905.3 million EMR tokens are currently locked in the ecosystem, while over 39.3 million have been burned.

Washington, D.C., June 2, 2026 — The Digital Sovereignty Alliance (DSA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing clear and ethical public policy, research and education surrounding emerging technologies, today announced the completion of the inaugural session of its new Digital Asset Case Study Course, an educational initiative designed to introduce students to the economic, technological, and policy questions shaping the digital asset economy.
Developed in partnership with Professor Charles C.Y. Wang, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Giveback Backpack, the program brings the Harvard case study method into a high school learning environment. The inaugural session was delivered to students at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, marking the beginning of a four-part educational series exploring digital assets, capital markets, trust, leadership, and the future of business in an increasingly digital world.
Professor Wang, a leading scholar in accounting, digital assets, and capital markets, guided students through the analysis of a real-world business case focused on Alibaba. Rather than relying on traditional lectures, the session encouraged students to evaluate competing perspectives, engage in evidence-based discussion, and develop their own conclusions about complex business and governance challenges.
“At DSA, we believe students should have the opportunity to engage with the technologies and ideas that are shaping the future of our economy and society,” said Adrian Wall, Managing Director of DSA. “This program is about building critical thinking skills, encouraging thoughtful dialogue, and giving young people the tools they need to understand and participate in an increasingly digital world.”
The initiative also supports the work of Giveback Backpack, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding educational opportunity across Africa. Through its programs, students receive backpacks equipped with learning materials and technology resources designed to improve access to education and help prepare them for future academic and career success.
Saturday’s session served as the first installment of a four-part curriculum that will continue through August, providing students with opportunities to engage with topics at the intersection of technology, finance, public policy, and leadership. The program reflects DSA’s broader educational mission to help young people develop the critical thinking skills needed to navigate emerging technologies and participate thoughtfully in public discourse.
About Digital Sovereignty Alliance
The Digital Sovereignty Alliance (DSA) is a nonprofit social welfare organization committed to advocating for public policies that support ethical innovation in decentralized technologies, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3, and artificial intelligence. DSA conducts research, organizes educational events, and promotes policies that prioritize public welfare and digital sovereignty.
Media contact
Maghan Lusk
PR@dsaf.org

On Wednesday, the House of Lords committee advised the UK to pursue stablecoin oversight while ensuring they don’t choke off the pound sterling market.
In its report, it cautioned the UK risks falling behind global peers such as the United States and the European Union if its regulatory framework for stablecoins remains too restrictive.
The committee also detailed that heavy-handed requirements risk paralyzing the market’s progress. It recommended that the central bank drop its planned caps on user wallets and stop requiring issuers to hold zero-interest deposits.
Nonetheless, the House of Lords committee stressed the importance of a stablecoin framework. It explained that the current regulatory gap leaves the UK behind the US and EU, effectively freezing domestic stablecoin funding while dollar-pegged options boom internationally.
Stablecoins are digital assets that are pegged to traditional currencies, such as the US dollar or British pound. Although dollar-backed tokens dominate worldwide market share, the production of stablecoins with sterling-pegged currencies is still in the very early stages.
What is the House of Lords Committee opposed to?
Authorities in the UK are working toward finalizing stablecoin regulations before the end of the year, with rules expected to align closely with those in the United States.
The House of Lords Committee so far favors the bulk of the Bank of England (BoE) and the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposals, but warns that some mandates risk the business case for UK-issued tokens.
It wrote, “The Bank, [Financial Conduct Authority] and HM Treasury ​must ​recognize that the stablecoin market is ​nascent and growing, and adapt ‌the regulatory regime as the market develops.”
The cross-party group approves proposals for fiat-linked stablecoins to hold high-quality assets on a one-to-one basis and backs a BoE liquidity facility for systemic providers.
However, it criticized a proposal that would force issuers to place 40% of their backing assets in non-interest-bearing Bank of England deposits, arguing that it may make it harder for firms to operate and compete globally.
It also cautioned against temporary limits on stablecoin holdings, saying they may stifle innovation in the GBP stablecoin market and be hard to enforce.
The committee also singled out unhosted wallets and called on HM Treasury, the Bank of England, and the FCA to evaluate how well current regulations address their risks.
Earlier, the BoE had defended all its proposals as vital to prevent bank runs into digital assets. The Committee panel chair, Sheila Noakes, in response to the bank’s statement, however, called for even “a principles-based, less prescriptive approach.”
Overall, the committee encourages a “use-case agnostic” framework that protects consumers and financial stability while allowing different stablecoin applications to develop naturally.
Additionally, peers cautioned regulators against treating stablecoins as inherently riskier than current payment methods such as card networks and bank transfers.
Nonetheless, the BoE is expected to publish its final draft ​rules for systemic stablecoins later this month.
The committee insists on regulators maintaining their framework schedule
The House of Lords also called on regulators to stick to their regulatory timeline, arguing that slow progress could allow the US and EU to take the lead in digital payments innovation.
In its report, it warned that falling behind on regulation could leave British challenger banks and small businesses excluded from a rapidly developing global payments network.
Noakes did not hold back in highlighting the extent to which the UK has lost ground. She commented: “The global stablecoin market is dominated by US dollar stablecoins and has evolved to serve cryptoasset trading.
New uses for stablecoins are emerging, and regulators worldwide are establishing regulatory frameworks. The UK is lagging behind compared with the US and the EU, but is now moving in the right direction.”
She also urged that the new framework should allow for innovation while curbing the relevant risks, asking authorities to “get it right.”
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Global digital asset and AI infrastructure firm Galaxy Digital has launched a new OTC (over-the-counter) prediction markets trading desk, which is expected to give institutional investors a platform to place bets on prediction events at a scale larger than retail traders.
The new service, run through Galaxy’s global markets desk, covers non-sports event contracts listed on Kalshi and Polymarket, according to a company press release.
The Nasdaq-listed firm then completed a $10 million inaugural trade with crypto hedge fund Arca, tied to the fate of U.S. digital asset legislation.
Institutions want a piece of the prediction market pie
Prediction markets have grown rapidly over the past two years, but liquidity remains thin for individuals chasing higher gains with bigger capital. Bloomberg reported that Galaxy’s single OTC trade with Arca worth 10 million was almost five times the size of the total volume on a Kalshi-listed contract tracking the same crypto legislation. The difference between institutional capital and retail is simply astronomical.
Galaxy’s head of prediction markets, Gilbert Wasserman, told Bloomberg that privacy is a major attraction for these institutional investors.
Trades and bets placed on platforms like Polymarket can expose wallet addresses, making it difficult for institutional players to take positions without the public’s knowledge.
However, Galaxy will structure these trades as event swaps under pre-existing ISDA agreements. This framework would allow institutions to trade prediction markets without setting up separate legal infrastructure or directly opening accounts on specific prediction market platforms.
CLARITY Act focus of Galaxy Arca $10m trade
The $10 million transaction between Galaxy and Arca revolves around the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, and whether it will pass Congress before 2027. According to the contract, Arca would pay Galaxy if the bill passes. If it fails to pass, Galaxy pays Arca.
Jeff Dorman, Arca’s chief investment officer, mentioned that prediction markets are among the best tools for hedging exposure to the recent regulatory negotiations in crypto, but that liquidity on existing platforms makes direct participation difficult for larger funds.
“Event-driven markets are becoming core to how sophisticated investors express macro views, and they deserve institutional infrastructure to match,” Jason Urban, Galaxy’s global co-head of digital assets, said in the press statement.
Prediction market expansion
Galaxy Digital has also stated that it will allow the combination of prediction market positions with other types of hedges across multiple asset classes.
This would ensure a wider set of strategies rather than taking isolated bets. The firm also plans to expand beyond Kalshi and Polymarket to additional platforms over time.
The company will conduct business only with institutional firms and assess its offerings on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, according to Yahoo Finance’s CryptoProwl report.
Shares of Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) fell 6% on Tuesday, tracking a broader decline across crypto-related stocks. The stock was trading at $29.06 per share as at the time of writing.
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Meta is pulling back parts of its controversial plan to record employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training.
The retreat was disclosed on Tuesday in an internal memo by Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. It follows a protest campaign that saw employees circulate petitions, post physical flyers in conference rooms and on vending machines, and openly compare the company to an “Employee Data Extraction Factory.”
How the protest unfolded at Meta
The monitoring program was initially launched by Meta on April 22 by loading the software into the laptops of U.S.-based employees, enabling it to track the movements of the mouse, clicks, and keystrokes. It emphasized that such a program is vital in training AI agents to complete computerized tasks independently.
“If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Across the Atlantic, UK-based Meta employees have begun organizing with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a division of the Communication Workers Union. Speaking against the move by Meta, an organizer with the UK-based United Tech and Allied Workers union (UTAW), Eleanor Payne said:
Meta’s workers are paying the price for management’s reckless and expensive bets. They are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them.
Employees were not given the option to opt out, which fueled privacy concerns and raised fears they were training AI systems designed to eventually replace them.
The backlash escalated quickly, with flyers appearing across multiple U.S. offices, in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and in restrooms. The pamphlets directed colleagues to an online petition opposing the rollout.
Both the flyers and petition cited the National Labor Relations Act, noting that workers are legally protected when organizing to improve working conditions.
Hundreds of employees also voiced opposition on internal channels, according to a New York Times report.
The pushback worked, as Meta makes changes
Employee anger at AI-driven restructuring has been common across the tech industry in 2026. But what has not been commonplace is concessions.
As Cryptopolitan reported in March, more than 30,000 tech jobs were cut in early 2026 as companies including Amazon, Meta, and Crypto.com cited AI efficiency, with Meta alone eliminating over 1,000 positions in its AI division. In most of those cases, worker objections made no difference.
In this case, Meta staff pushed back and got a measurable result. The company did not cancel the program in its entirety, but it made adjustments.
Stephane Kasriel said in the memo:
While we remain confident in the privacy protections we put in place at launch, which went through several layers of risk review, we have heard your concerns about personal data on work devices, battery life, and wanting more control over when capturing happens
Employees will now be able to pause the tracking software for up to 30 minutes at a time and request full exemptions from the program.
The team also said it had optimized the software to reduce battery drain and home internet usage spikes, two complaints that had been raised repeatedly on internal company channels.
As of the time of writing, Meta has yet to comment on the memo.
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The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday, June 1, announced it had placed sanctions on Nobitex, Iran’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, along with three other digital asset platforms, due to accusations of aiding Tehran in evading Western sanctions and helping to funnel money to blacklisted institutions including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
This action by the U.S. Treasury is a part of the Trump administration’s wider pressure campaign against Iran, all tied to the ongoing Iran-U.S. conflict. CEO Amir Hossein Rad and two brothers identified as the exchange’s controllers have also been indicted in the Treasury’s statement.
Treasury claims Nobitex facilitated terror financing
The U.S. Treasury said Nobitex had offered “significant support” to the Iranian government and also processed a “significant number” of digital transactions connected to the IRGC and Iran’s central bank.
The department also alleged that Nobitex also helped to move assets out of the country to protect regime wealth, even during government-imposed internet blackouts after U.S. combat operations began in Iran.
“While Iran’s economy is in free fall, the regime has chosen to co-opt digital asset technologies for its own corrupt agenda, including evading sanctions and transferring wealth out of the country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the statement.
Nobitex denied all allegations
In an earlier statement to Reuters in April, Nobitex had vehemently denied any direct government connections and stated that it had not knowingly helped the Iranian state.
Any illicit funds that passed through the platform did so without management knowledge or approval, the company claimed. It also denied that the two brothers had ever used an alternative identity at any point in time.
The U.S Department of Treasury also sanctioned three other digital asset exchanges in addition to Iran’s foremost crypto exchange in the same announcement.
These actions fall under the Trump administration’s “Economic Fury” campaign, a title mentioned in the Treasury’s press release statement.
This sanction placed on the crypto exchange means any U.S. person or entity is prohibited from transacting with Nobitex, its founders, or its CEO. Foreign financial institutions that help to process transactions on their behalf also risk secondary sanctions from the U.S.
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ChatGPT crossed 1 billion global monthly active users in May, becoming the fastest application ever to reach that number, according to Sensor Tower. It hit the milestone roughly three years after launch, outpacing Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
The milestone comes at a time when both OpenAI and Anthropic are gearing up for their IPOs, with Anthropic having filed confidentially for its U.S. IPO on Monday, according to Reuters, with OpenAI set to follow suit soon.
ChatGPT moved from saturation in Q4 2025 to a billion users
As Cryptopolitan observed in December, monthly active users of ChatGPT globally increased only by 6% from August to November 2025 to reach 810 million, a growth rate that implied that ChatGPT had almost become saturated.
Gemini’s users rose 30% over the same stretch. The slow climb was significant enough that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an internal “code red” memo directing staff to improve personalization, reliability, and image generation.
The 1 billion milestone shows the ceiling was higher than the December data implied. ChatGPT added roughly 190 million monthly app users in about six months after the saturation warning.
Claude sees more engagement as ChatGPT usage dips
As per reports by Sensor Tower, users of ChatGPT in the US who downloaded Claude in the first quarter of 2026 spent 5% less time using ChatGPT one month later as compared to their usage in the last eight months.
The user base of Claude stands much lower than that of ChatGPT, being only 56 million global monthly active app users until Q2 2026. On a yearly basis, however, the MAU growth rate of Claude outshines that of ChatGPT by standing at 640%, against the latter’s modest growth rate of 62%.
Users are not leaving ChatGPT, rather are splitting their time between ChatGPT and Claude.
That tracks with where prediction-market money is sitting. On Polymarket, traders price Anthropic at roughly 84% to have the best AI model by the end of June, ahead of both Google, xAI and OpenAI.
Which company has best AI model end of June? | Source: Polymarket
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 last week and said Mythos-class models will be available to all customers in the coming weeks. Cryptopolitan reported that Opus 4.8 outperformed GPT-5.5 on at least 12 benchmarks covering knowledge work, agentic tool use, and long-context tasks.
Anthropic filed for its IPO a day before the milestone
Anthropic filed confidentially for a US initial public offering on Monday, June 1, a day before the ChatGPT data landed. Reports say OpenAI is preparing to file its own confidential prospectus with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the coming weeks, targeting a potential debut later in 2026.
At the time of writing, Polymarket traders give Anthropic a 74% probability of listing before OpenAI.
Will Anthropic or OpenAI IPO first? | Source: Polymarket
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Coinbase Ventures has purchased ENA tokens on the open market and announced a partnership with Ethena to build onchain savings products for more than 100 million combined users.
Cryptopolitan has previously reported on Coinbase’s growing presence in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, where the exchange took over as the official USDC treasury deployer and acquired the USDH brand assets from Native Markets in May.
The deal with Ethena is Coinbase’s latest move to expand its footprint across decentralized finance protocols, and this time around, it is synthetic dollar infrastructure.
What does the partnership include?
Coinbase Ventures wrote on X that “Ethena is a critical player in onchain finance,” adding that they are looking forward to a closer partnership between Ethena and both Coinbase and USDC.
The collaboration targets onchain finance and savings products aimed at their combined user base, which runs up to over 100 million, with Ethena stating that the first growth initiative from the partnership will launch next week. However, neither side specified what the product would be.
Also, both parties in the deal did not disclose the size of the ENA purchase or the financial terms of the partnership.
Ethena’s position in DeFi
Ethena operates a synthetic dollar protocol on Ethereum. The project holds around $5.4 billion in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data, placing it among the larger DeFi protocols by that metric.
The protocol has generated approximately $983 million in cumulative fees since launch.
At some point on June 2, ENA traded at around $0.097, a jump of over 10% from the prior 24 hours. The token is currently trading at $0.091 and has a market capitalization of over $825 million, with 9 billion of its 15 billion total supply in circulation.
Ethena has gone through multiple funding rounds, raising a total of $166 million from various backers, including Franklin Templeton, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Binance Labs, per DeFiLlama records.
Coinbase’s expansion pattern
Coinbase has pursued similar partnerships this year as it became the sole USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid after Circle’s stablecoin was designated as the Aligned Quote Asset on the trading platform.
That arrangement with Hyperliquid gave Coinbase a major role in a network that processes over $176 billion in monthly perpetual futures volume.
In March, Coinbase also launched 24/7 stock perpetual futures offering synthetic exposure to the Magnificent 7 tech stocks for international traders.
According to the exchange, these moves are part of its push to make USDC the default settlement layer for onchain capital markets.
Compass Point analysts estimated that the Hyperliquid USDC deal could redirect $60 million to $80 million in annual EBITDA away from Circle and Coinbase combined, as Hyperliquid captures most of the reserve income from USDC deposits on its platform.
It is not yet known if Ethena’s partnership will follow a similar revenue-sharing structure or takes a different form.
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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has reposted an earlier proposal he made to ditch the U.S. dollar as the default reference point for stablecoins. He suggests that users hold personalized baskets of prediction market shares tied to their own spending patterns instead.
The proposal by Vitalik follows a trend where more countries are choosing to conduct their trades in non-dollar settlement alternatives. These alternatives have ranged from TradFi proposals such as BRICS currencies to decentralized finance experiments.
What did Vitalik Buterin propose?
Vitalik Buterin recently reposted an idea he first outlined months earlier on the social media platform X in a longer essay about the future of prediction markets.
Buterin’s central question is simple: “If we’re making a synthetic stable, what should it really be stable WITH RESPECT TO?”
His answer involves the use of a local large language model (LLM) on each user’s device that would analyze that person’s spending habits and assemble a custom basket of prediction market positions representing a set number of days of expected future expenses.
Wealth growth would come from holding stocks, ETH, or other assets, while stability would come from the personalized basket.
The proposal also requires that prediction markets be denominated in assets people actually want to hold, whether that is interest-bearing traditional currencies, wrapped equities, or ETH. Buterin argued that non-interest-bearing currencies carry opportunity costs that are too high to serve as the base layer.
Buterin has been vocal about the risks of dollar dependence for months. In January, he said that pegging stablecoins to the dollar ties supposedly decentralized systems to a single national currency’s monetary policy and geopolitical exposure. Over long time horizons, even moderate inflation could erode usefulness, he argued.
Regarding oracle design, Buterin stated that systems governed primarily by token ownership lack natural defenses and must charge their users significant fees to make attacks uneconomical. Blockchains rely on oracle systems to access external price data. If those oracles can be captured by well-funded actors, the entire protocol becomes vulnerable.
His third issue was that when stablecoins use staked ETH as collateral, the yield earned by locked collateral competes with what stablecoin users could earn elsewhere.
What are the other alternatives to the dollar?
J.P. Morgan’s global macro research shows that a growing number of energy contracts in commodity markets are being priced in currencies other than the dollar. Central bank reserves held in dollars have also declined over the past two decades.
The Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development reports that Russia now conducts roughly a third of its trade in Chinese yuan. Brazil and China agreed in 2023 to settle trade directly between the real and the yuan, and India purchased a million barrels of oil in rupees that same year.
90% of foreign exchange transactions and 48% of SWIFT payments are still done in dollars, and most crypto users prefer to use dollar-pegged stablecoins for payments and savings. Tether’s USDT accounts for roughly $186.8 billion in circulation, which is more than 60% of the total stablecoin supply.
The available decentralized alternatives like Ethena’s USDe and Sky Dollar each account for around $6.3 billion, while Dai has contracted to approximately $4.5 billion.
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Bitcoin fell below $68,000 on Tuesday, hitting its lowest level since early April as traders reacted to Strategy’s Bitcoin sale, ETF outflows, and NEW Mt. Gox wallet movement.
Strategy sold 32 BTC between May 26 and May 31 for about $2.5 million, with the money going toward distributions on its STRC preferred stock.
U.S. stocks recovered, with the S&P 500 climbing to a record high near $69 trillion, while the Dow also touched a new intraday peak and chip stocks jumped.

Strive (NASDAQ: STRV) purchased 2,500 Bitcoins between May 23 and June 1 for approximately $185.2 million, bringing the company’s treasury to 19,000 BTC
The 2,500 BTC purchase was funded almost entirely through the company’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock (SATA), with an average cost of about $74,092 per coin.
Is Strive still buying BTC?
An SEC 8-K filing confirmed that Strive raised most of the money used for its most recent Bitcoin purchase through its SATA stock. The company issued 1,754,188 new shares that generated approximately $175.4 million. The remaining $9.8 million came from selling Class A common stock (ASST).
The average price Strive paid per coin was $74,092, which is lower than its previous purchase when it bought 1,109 BTC at about $76,989 per coin. During the latest purchase window, Bitcoin traded below $71,000 at certain points, meaning the treasury firm bought during a price drop.
Strive’s holdings have risen from 16,500 BTC to 19,000 BTC, representing a 15.2% increase in total holdings over a single reporting period. The CEO, Matt Cole, disclosed the deal on X, adding that the company has a quarter-to-date BTC yield of 23.0%, a year-to-date yield of 36.7%, and an amplification ratio of 57.0%.
The 8-K filing also shows cash and equivalents rising from $93.3 million to $137.3 million, even after Strive spent $185 million on Bitcoin. Strive raised about $229 million total from both equity instruments, and the company stated that the higher cash balance helps it maintain an 18-month dividend reserve for SATA holders.
Strategy’s rare Bitcoin sale
Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), the largest corporate Bitcoin holder at 843,706 BTC, disclosed that around the same time as Strive’s purchase, it had sold 32 Bitcoins for $2.5 million to fund dividend payments on its own preferred stock, STRC. This is the second time Strategy has ever sold any of its Bitcoin holdings.
Michael Saylor, Strategy’s executive chairman, responded to Cole’s announcement regarding the Bitcoin purchase with a brief endorsement on X, posting “@Strive for Bitcoin.”
Cole previously announced that Strive expects to increase the size of its at-the-market programs by $2.1 billion each for Class A shares and SATA, which would bring total ATM capacity to approximately $5.15 billion. However, the expansion requires amended SEC filings and a certificate of amendment for SATA.
Strive plans to change SATA‘s current dividend payouts from a monthly to a daily basis beginning June 16, in order to smooth out the concentrated buying pressure that currently builds ahead of each monthly ex-dividend date, and potentially reduce the periodic pauses in Bitcoin accumulation that observers have noticed.
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Movement, the blockchain project that faced a token-dumping scandal that led to the removal of its co-founder Rushi Manche last year, has relaunched as a standalone Layer 1 network targeting stablecoin payments and remittances in emerging markets.
Current CEO Torab Torabi announced the pivot, adding that it comes with partnerships, one of which is Circle, and access to licensed payment infrastructure across the US, Canada, and the European Union.
How did Movement move from Ethereum Layer 2 to a sovereign chain?
Movement initially started out as an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the Move programming language, the same code Facebook developed for the abandoned Libra/Diem project.
Torabi reportedly stated that the old network was a “Frankenstein” chain that was put together from components like Celestia for data availability, with latency around seven seconds per transaction.
“If you’re seven seconds in L2, what the hell is the point of you existing to begin with, right?” Torabi said in an interview.
Movement’s new architecture runs its own validator set on a dedicated Layer 1, targeting settlement times under 500 milliseconds, which is over fourteen times faster than seven seconds.
Dozens of Ethereum scaling networks compete for users and liquidity, and now some projects are abandoning the general-purpose rollup thesis in favor of specialized applications. Polygon is reported to have made a similar shift toward payments infrastructure.
Stablecoin rails and emerging market ambitions
Move Industries, the entity that assumed core development responsibilities after the scandal, has lined up partnerships with Circle, wallet startups KAST and Sorted, and tokenization projects including Oro, Yuzu Money, and Zoth, according to its announcement.
Circle launched USDCx as a natively issued stablecoin on Movement in March 2026 to support payments, treasury, and savings products, according to Circle’s own announcement on X.
Torabi stated that the company’s ambitions are focused on the roughly $685 billion remittance market serving low and middle-income countries.
According to the CEO, Movement is no longer a crypto company. “We are a fintech company that uses blockchain rails,” he told The Block.
However, that market is not free from competition, as the likes of Stripe and Paradigm are building out Tempo, major institutions back Canton, and established chains like Solana and Ethereum already process significant stablecoin volume.
Torabi acknowledged the pressure but said many of Movement’s new partnerships came inbound. He said, “Circle was pretty aggressive in wanting to obviously win market share in ‘the countries you can’t pronounce.'”
Cleaning up the token mess
The relaunch also involved financial restructuring. The Movement Network Foundation repurchased around 19% of tokens that had been allocated to investors, equivalent to about 4.2% of the total supply.
According to Torabi, the buyback was a chance to bring in investors aligned with the new direction.
Analysts say that this cleanup was necessary. In early 2025, a Binance investigation found that Rentech, a market maker connected to Movement, controlled 66 million MOVE tokens (about 5% of the total supply) and sold them immediately after the token’s debut. This action led to a $38 million sell-off, causing both Binance and Coinbase to suspend MOVE trading.
It was later reported that leaked internal documents showed Movement Labs had promised as much as 10% of the token supply to shadow advisers through undisclosed agreements, making the fallout take a turn for the worse.
The then-CEO and cofounder, Manche, was let go by Movement Labs in May 2025 after an internal investigation tied him to the $38 million market manipulation incident. He went on to launch Nyx Group in December 2025, a $100 million investment vehicle backing blockchain founders.
The MOVE token currently trades around $0.014, according to CoinMarketCap, down from an all-time high of $1.45 in December 2024, a decline of over 99%.
Torabi claims the project has kept more than 90% of its team since the scandal, stating that the retention rate is a sign that builders still believe in the underlying technology even if the brand took damage.
Movement is now putting the incident in its past and charting a new path under its new leadership, and this time around, it is betting its future on financial services and hoping that its latest pivot is enough to make users forgive its past misgivings.
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Pingu Exchange (PINGU) announced its closure date as July 31 and was quickly joined by 0xPPL, which also announced that it would be ending all operations at the end of June. The development adds to the growing list of projects shutting down in the crypto ecosystem.
The news reveals a growing pattern in the industry where more and more projects that had real users, real activity, and real investors find it hard to pull through the market, eventually closing up shop as prices continue to spiral.
Pingu’s failed gamble
The fall of Pingu Exchange is a reminder of the harsh realities of migrating to a different chain. The platform launched in January 2024 on Arbitrum with around $270,000 in capital and was gaining ground in the ecosystem, generating $2.4 billion in trades over 18 months with around $650,000 in ETH and USDC shared to stakers.
Following the success, the team decided to pivot to the Monad mainnet, betting its treasury funds on the growth of the new chain. This move didn’t pay off, and in six months, trading volume had dropped to $80 million, compared to the $2.4 billion it did while on Arbitrum.
Additionally, total funds on the platform dropped to $59,781 and were generating only $71 in fees daily, according to DefiLlama. By June, the protocol had nothing left to work with.
Following its closure, the team will distribute the remaining 64.46 ETH in its treasury to users who bought and held on to the PINGU token on Arbitrum in 2024. On the other hand, the team’s share of the total token supply will not be used to claim any ETH, allowing PINGU token holders to get a better payout.
0xPPL ceases operations after four years
0xPPL’s shutdown is a lot harder to understand, as the project had sufficient backing, making this difficult to categorize as a small team losing steam. The project launched in August 2024 with notable projects like Alliance DAO, Anagram, and Peak XV Partners backing them up.
On top of that, they also had popular crypto figures like Anatoly Yakovenko and Balaji Srinivasan backing the project.
Sadly, all that was not enough as the project shut down all trading operations on June 6, and the app completely goes offline on June 30, 2026. Following this announcement, the team has also urged users to move all funds out and not wait for the last minute.
Projects are losing steam amid extended winter
Bitcoin currently sits below the $69,000 mark on CoinMarketCap, down 5.1% in the past hour and down 12% over the past week. Additionally, Ethereum also sits at $1,912 and has suffered a drop of 2.5% at the time of writing.
The effect of these numbers on the broader industry is telling as Consensys, Grayscale, Kraken, and Ledger have all delayed going public this year. Currently, the only crypto company that has completed its stock listing in 2026 remains BitGo, which raised around $213 million in January 2026, and now trades 36% below its initial price listing.
These numbers and the effects on the market leave smaller projects with little to no options, especially as they do not have any stock market options to fall back on. So whenever their trading volume drops and token prices fall, they usually run out of money and can only look to retreat from the market.
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Brazil’s central bank reportedly introduced mandatory independent audits for crypto service providers. It will add another layer to the already tough rules in the country.
According to the published rules, crypto firms that want a license or to renew an existing one will have to submit an independent auditor’s report. It will be a part of the approval process. It added that the audits must be carried out by professionals registered with Brazil’s securities regulator, the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM).
Audit costs may squeeze smaller Crypto firms
Regulators want auditors to assess whether crypto firms are doing the right checks. This includes proper anti-money laundering controls, counter-terrorism financing procedures, customer asset segregation, internal risk management systems, and employee compliance programs in place.
If a firm fails in any of those checks, then it may struggle to obtain authorization to operate in the country.
This comes in when the global crypto market is dealing with high selling pressure. Bitcoin price has dropped by more than 10% over the last 7 days. BTC is trading at $68,960 at press time.
Brazil pushed the process back in 2022. Lawmakers approved the country’s first legal framework for virtual assets in that year. However, after one year, the federal government officially appointed the central bank as the primary regulator for crypto service providers.
Watchdogs added some licensing requirements in 2025. This covered custody standards and anti-money laundering controls. It also added Stablecoin oversight and corporate governance obligations. The authority allowed the existing providers until October 2026 to comply.
The central bank has not disclosed expected audit costs. Compliance experts suggest that independent reviews can easily run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It depends on the size of the firm, transaction volumes, and custody arrangements.
Big exchanges can manage this cost, but it’ll be difficult for smaller platforms and startups. Earlier, Cryptopolitan reported that Brazil banned prediction markets.
Brazil raises the bar for Crypto exchanges
In a report, Chainalysis mentioned that Brazil processed around $318 billion worth of crypto transactions in 2024 and 2025. This makes the country one of the crucial crypto markets in the world.
The size of that market means most major exchanges will want to maintain a presence there. The question is whether all of them will be able to satisfy the growing list of regulatory requirements.
What makes Brazil stand out is that regulators are not focusing on just one area.
The framework combines licensing requirements, custody rules, Travel Rule compliance, stablecoin oversight, self-hosted wallet monitoring, and now mandatory independent audits.
For global exchanges, market access is increasingly becoming a compliance exercise rather than a simple registration process.
In other words, Brazil is no longer asking crypto firms to promise they are following the rules. It now wants third parties to prove it.
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A recent report published by the European Central Bank today has stated that central banks globally now hold more gold than US government bonds and treasuries in their reserves for the very first time.
Geopolitical tensions, concerns over a risk of sanctions, and a growing desire among some countries to lessen their exposure to dollar-denominated assets have been key factors driving this shift in central bank reserve allocations .
The golden switch
The ECB’s had assessed the international role of the euro over the past year and found that gold accounted for 27% of global central bank reserves as at the end of 2025. This figure stood at 20% just one year earlier. US Treasuries, however, moved in the opposite direction, falling from 25% to 22% through the same period of 2025, according to the report. Assets linked to the euro remained steady at 15% wtih no increase or drop.
This ‘switch’ means gold has officially displaced the dominant reserve asset for the past few decades after the World Wars. The US government debt and treasuries served as the default store of value for central banks in managing exchange rate stability and liquidity. This has now switched actively to gold as a store of value.
U.S. sanctions a catalyst
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the war that followed, the US and its allies froze Russian dollar-based reserves in support of Ukraine. This move then prompted world governments to assess how much of their national wealth sat in assets the United States could restrict, and how this could be changed as noted by the ECB findings.
ECB President Christine Lagarde addressed the trend directly in the report. “Geopolitical tensions continue to drive strong demand for gold among central banks,” Lagarde said.
Gold, on the other hand, carries no such risk and cannot be frozen by a foreign government, a trait that became more attractive to central banks and world governments after the U.S.’ actions in 2022.
Will this switch affect demand for the dollar?
The results of the ECB’s assessment do not point to an immediate drop in demand for U.S. government debt. U.S. Treasuries continue to account for more than one-fifth of global foreign exchange reserves, while the dollar remains the dominant currency in international trade and finance.
Notably, the ECB‘s report also found that the euro’s share of global reserves had remained the same over the time period, which ultimately suggests the central bank value purchases are flowing primarily into gold rather than into competing reserve currencies.
China, India, Turkey, and Poland have been the largest buyers of gold for their central banks in recent years, as gold purchases by governments have continued to rise since 2022.
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OpenSea, one of the biggest and most popular NFT marketplaces in the crypto industry, has teased a potential upcoming offering of perpetual contracts trading platformed on the Hyperliquid blockchain’s infrastructure.
This was signaled by OpenSea’s product marketing lead, Zack Brenner, via a post on X on Monday.
OpenSea cooking perps product
Zack posted on X on June 1 teasing the new product and asking his followers about who would love early access to perpetual contracts on the platform. The post drew almost 800 replies and over 1,000 likes.
Who wants early access to perps on @opensea ? 👀
— Zack Brenner (@zjbrenner) June 1, 2026
A follower then asked whether Hyperliquid would power the feature, to which Brenner replied “YES.” However, OpenSea has not published a product page, launch date, list of supported assets, or possible user terms for the planned feature yet.
Why OpenSea is building with Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid has over the past year proven to be a major on-chain platform for derivatives trading and general blockchain features. By integrating Hyperliquid’s infrastructure directly into OpenSea’s framework, the NFT marketplace platform could offer perp trading without an entirely new exchange being built in into the marketplace.
The partnership between these two crypto giants is expected to give the marketplace a relatively smooth introduction into crypto derivatives trading, which is already a market dominated majorly by centralized exchanges and some decentralized protocols.
Hyperliquid will also expect to gain a heavier wave of new volume on its network, as it would be partnering with a global consumer-intensive brand with with a large pool of users and wallets.
Hyperliquid has also drawn a lot of interest from traditional finance in recent months, in addition to its retail offerings in derivatives trading. Grayscale recently updated an ETF filing tied to Hyperliquid under the ticker HYPG with a 0.29% fee, while 21Shares and Bitwise already offer Hyperliquid-based products.
OpenSea’s position in NFTs
NFTs have lost plenty of ground since the 2021 peaks and the NFT boom in 2022, however, OpenSea is still doing $66.52 million in monthly NFT trading volume, a value representing 19.9% of the entire NFT exchanges’ market share. This ranks OpenSea at third on CoinGecko’s latest NFT marketplace rankings, according to data by WuBlockchain.
A perpetual trading product would represent a sharp strategic pivot from strictly NFT trading. OpenSea had delayed its SEA token launch in March due to weak market conditions, with CEO Devin Finzer stating at the time that the team wanted to ensure “every piece is in place” before launching the token.
Adding derivatives and perpetual contracts trading in partnership with Hyperliquid could help the NFT marketplace’s serve existing users who would want to hedge NFT floor prices or take positions on multiple other crypto assets without leaving the platform.
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