Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) headed toward $29,000 on April 26 after overnight gains marked a solid rebound.

Bitcoin short squeeze risk on the rise

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD advancing swiftly during Asia trading to deliver 6.5% upside versus its local lows.

The pair had begun its comeback after the April 25 Wall Street open amid fresh concerns over United States bank stability.

These came as First Republic Bank reported a dramatic fall in deposits, its share price tanking 50% on the day.

A familiar catalyst for crypto markets, the banking crisis reminded investors that it had gone nowhere since March, with crypto sources already predicting its next chapter.

The crypto community is calling out the hypocrisy of Gary Gensler, the head of the United States securities regulator, after a 2018 video emerged of him stating that cryptocurrencies are on par with commodities or cash and are not securities.

The video came from a “Blockchain and Money” class in the Fall Semester of 2018 taught by Gensler, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before he became chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

On the topic of initial coin offerings (ICOs), Gensler said that "three-quarters of the market are not ICOs or not what would be called securities" and named the U.S., Canadian and Taiwanese markets as the "three jurisdictions that follow something similar to the Howey Test."

"Three-quarters of the market is non-securities, it's just a commodity, cash,crypto,” Gensler then said.

While Gensler briefly acknowledged that ICOs may spark a securities debate, he concluded that “three-quarters of the market is not particularly relevant as a legal matter.”

Solana (SOL) users will soon be able to interact with the network through an open-source plugin enabled on OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT.

The plugin will allow ChatGPT to check wallet balances, transfer Solana-native tokens and purchase nonfungible tokens (NFTs) when OpenAI makes plugins available, according to an April 25 tweet by Solana Labs, the development firm behind the Solana blockchain.

Solana Labs is also encouraging developers to test out the open-source code to retrieve on-chain data that they may be interested in.

The screenshot shared by Solana Labs shows that ChatGPT can retrieve a list of NFTs owned by a particular Solana address, which shares an attached metadata link to the NFT — presumably sourced from Solana Labs' block explorer.

Solana Labs did not mention whether the plugin would be launched when OpenAI makes the plugin feature available to all.