Crypto prices bounced this week as the market seemingly looked to price in easing trade war tensions, with no landmines perceived in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision or this week’s economic data releases.
Among the biggest winners of the price action was beleaguered ETH, which rallied 22% on Thursday to break above $2k for the first time since late March and posted its largest daily gain since 2021. Correspondingly, the ETH/BTC ratio popped as much as 30% off its Thursday lows, representing Ether’s best period of outperformance since mid-2022 in the months ahead of the Merge.
With ETH sentiment having spent much of 2025 finding newer lows on a weekly basis, signal of a priority shift from the Ethereum Foundation has given traders hope that something is happening. This week's market action is a very positive blip on a years-long ETH/BTC decline but traders hope that it is the start of something more transformative.
Leading American crypto exchange Coinbase announced on Thursday that it will acquire Deribit – the undisputed global leader in crypto options – for $2.9B ($700M cash and 11M shares of COIN). The acquisition marks the largest deal that the crypto industry has ever seen and should enable Coinbase to expand on its derivatives offerings for international and advanced traders.
Later that day, Coinbase released earnings results for the first quarter of 2025. Revenues came in relatively strong at $2.03B (only 2% below analyst expectations, but its headline earnings result of $0.24 per share represented an 88% miss. This shortfall was largely driven by a 51% year-over-year increase in operating expenses and sizable $596M loss on company crypto holdings in Q1 (these losses may be recuperated in Q2 with increasing crypto prices).
Coinbase also unveiled early Friday that U.S. traders can now access 24/7 Bitcoin and Ether futures trading – a first for a CFTC-regulated exchange – with access to perpetual futures “coming soon.”
Big news 🚨 We’re excited to join forces with @Coinbase to power a new era in global crypto derivatives.
This acquisition will accelerate the foundation we’ve built – bringing spot, futures, perps, and options under one trusted brand.
Multiple high-profile technology companies announced their intentions to venture onchain with expansions into stablecoins this week.
Internet payments processor Stripe announced Wednesday it now supports stablecoins in its checkout suite, with intentions to further support stablecoins by allowing users in 101 countries to hold, send, and receive funds via fiat and stablecoin rails via “Stablecoin Financial Accounts.”
Bridge – the stablecoin API provider that Stripe acquired for $1.1B in February – introduced its own yield-bearing USDB stablecoin on Thursday, meanwhile, Latin American payments provider Ramp launched a stablecoin-backed card in partnership with Stripe.
Not one to miss out on the Stripe-fueled stablecoin hype train, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is reportedly mulling re-entering the stablecoin sector by using digital currencies for creator payouts three years after it shuttered the Diem digital currency project.
On Thursday, tokenized fund issuer Superstate released Opening Bell, a platform that enables companies to issue publicly registered equities directly onto blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum. The program’s first issuer will be SOL Strategies, a Canadian-registered Solana investment vehicle that trades under the ticker HODL.
Opening Bell provides public companies access to onchain capital markets. Meanwhile, private firms face lower listing standards and receive the chance to make shares available in crypto markets, with available paths to up-list on traditional exchanges.
That same day, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce posted that she is considering potential exemptions from registration that would allow firms to use distributed ledger technology to issue, trade, and settle securities.
1/ Stock is moving on-chain.
Today we're proud to announce Opening Bell—our platform for companies to issue SEC-registered shares directly onto blockchains 🛎️
Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky was sentenced to 12 years in prison this week for fraud and market manipulation.
Although Celsius promoted itself as “the safest place for your crypto,” its customers ended up losing billions of dollars after the firm misappropriated funds to “aggressively manipulate” the price of its CEL token, which eventually collapsed, unraveling the Ponzi scheme and making Celsius insolvent in the process.
In their sentencing memo, federal prosecutors sought twenty years imprisonment for Mashinsky’s “years-long campaign of lies and self-dealing that left in its wake billions in losses and thousands of victimized customers.”
🇺🇸 LATEST: US DOJ seeks 20-year prison sentence for Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, citing $4.7B in user losses and a deliberate campaign of fraud. pic.twitter.com/SDSg66cMRl
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower on-chain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
This week, Ryan and David unpack Ethereum’s game-changing “Pectra” upgrade, doubling Layer 2 blob space and sparking fresh debates on L1 scaling.
Meanwhile, Washington sets its sights on a $2 trillion stablecoin market, Apple’s App Store monopoly cracks open to crypto, and Coinbase makes a historic acquisition of Deribit. Plus, Bitcoin breaks $100K and ETH smashes $2k, are we officially back in bull territory? Find out on this week’s Weekly Rollup.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
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