Decentral Block Post

JPMorgan Chase emerged as the winner in the auction to acquire the deposits and a “substantial majority of assets” of the troubled bank First Republic. This marked the failure of the third regional bank in the United States since March and laid open the vulnerabilities in the legacy banking system.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC) has risen for four consecutive months from January through April, a feat it last achieved in 2013. Will the recovery extend in May?

Historical data does not give a clear advantage either to the bulls or the bears in May. The performance is split right in the middle with five positive and five negative monthly closes in May, according to Coinglass data.

The recovery in Bitcoin is facing a stiff hurdle above $30,000, indicating that the bulls are wary of buying at higher levels. That could be because of the upcoming Fed’s meeting on May 2 and 3, which is known to cause an increase in short-term volatility.

What are the levels that the bulls need to defend on Bitcoin and select altcoins if they want to keep the chances alive for the continuation of the up-move? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

A Coinbase executive claims to have discovered a “jailbreak” for artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, allowing it to calculate the probability of bizarre crypto price scenarios.

The crypto exchange’s head of business operations and avid ChatGPT user Conor Grogan shared a screenshot of the results in an April 30 Twitter post — showing that ChatGPT states there be a 15% chance that Bitcoin (BTC) will “fade to irrelevancy” with prices falling over 99.99% by 2035.

Meanwhile, the chatbot assigned a 20% chance for Ethereum (ETH) becoming irrelevant and approaching near-zero price levels by 2035.

ChatGPT was even less confident about Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE) however, attributing probabilities of 35% and 45% respectively for the coins to go to near zero.

The Coinbase executive concluded that ChatGPT is “generally” a “big fan” of Bitcoin but remains “more skeptical” when it comes to altcoins.

Risky assets marginally extend their up-move in April. The S&P 500 Index rose around 1.5% in April while Bitcoin (BTC) is on track to end the month with gains of more than 4%. Could the rally continue in May or is it time for a pullback?

The recovery could face headwinds if the United States banking woes escalate further. JPMorgan Asset Management chief investment officer Bob Michele said in an interview with Bloomberg that the turmoil at First Republic Bank is unlikely to be limited to the bank only, and could cause a domino effect.

If that happens, then the U.S. equity markets may witness a correction. However, it is difficult to predict how Bitcoin will react to such a crisis because, in the past few days, BTC price rose while legacy banking troubles deepened. But in case of a major upheaval in the U.S. banking sector, it is possible that Bitcoin will also face a correction sooner or later.

In the near term, Bitcoin and select altcoins are showing strength. Let’s study the charts of five cryptocurrencies that may outperform over the next few days.

Bitcoin price analysis

After two days of low volatile trading in Bitcoin, the bulls are trying to assert their supremacy on April 30.

Prominent YouTuber DidYouKnowGaming was able to regain access to his YouTube channel, which an anonymous bad actor hacked to promote XRP (XRP) cryptocurrency scams.

While hacking into YouTube channels to promote scams has been a long-standing method of targeting unwary investors, the number of creators on the platform reporting hacks has increased. Most recently, DidYouKnowGaming — a YouTuber with 2.4 million subscribers — warned his Twitter followers about a hack.

After gaining access to the account, the hacker changed the YouTuber’s profile and cover images to Ripple’s logo, as shown below.

YouTube’s swift intervention ensured damage control by preventing XRP hackers from interacting with the channel’s subscribers. Recently, one of the largest YouTube creators, Linus Tech Tips, also reported losing access to his channels.

While the exploit used by the hackers to gain access to YouTube accounts remains a mystery, the victim YouTubers have always been able to recover their accounts and deleted videos, if any.

The cryptocurrency market witnessed sharp volatility on April 26 on rumors that large sums of Bitcoin (BTC) were on the move from the wallets linked to the defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox and the United States government. A minor positive is that Bitcoin and select altcoins held their respective support levels.

After Bitcoin’s sharp rally in 2023, some traders seem to be planning to book profits. Coinglass reported that the Bitcoin balance held at Binance soared by 50,000 Bitcoin in the past 30 days.

While this could add to short-term pressure, bulls can take solace because the increase is not identical across exchanges. Coinglass said that the aggregate increase of Bitcoin balance across exchanges was 14,000 Bitcoin.

The next major event for the market is likely to be the U.S. Federal Reserve’s meeting on May 2 and 3. The FedWatch Tool projects a 90% probability of a 25 basis point rate hike in the meeting. Most analysts expect this to be the final rate hike before a pivot later in the year.

Could Bitcoin and select altcoins break above their respective resistance levels and resume the up-move? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

The United States must implement stablecoin legislation and digitize the U.S. dollar (USD) to mitigate the “very active de-dollarization taking place” around the world right now, says Jeremy Allaire, the chief executive of stablecoin issuer Circle.

Allaire’s comments at the Consensus 2023 conference on Wednesday, April 25, were made in light of the recent U.S. banking crisis.

The Circle — the stablecoin issuer behind USD Coin (USDC) — CEO called on Congress and the Federal Reserve to take action otherwise alternative currencies and payment systems will continue to eat into the dollar’s dominance:

“We have a very active de-dollarization taking place. You're having very significant reactions to the U.S. risks in the U.S. banking system, risks with the US government itself, a geopolitical imposition on many parts of the world [and] the desire for alternative payment systems all around the world.

“This is happening and it's accelerating,” he added.

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.

Unlike restricted proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin, the Polkadot blockchain allows cross-blockchain transfers of any asset or data, facilitates more transactions per second and needs less infrastructure.

Polkadot uses a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) blockchain centered on interoperability of parachains that connect to and are secured by the Relay Chain. Validators can validate both the Relay Chain and the parachains, making it a flexible and scalable blockchain solution.

The native token on the Polkadot blockchain is named DOT (DOT). It can be used on the Polkadot network for trading, staking, bonding, paying transaction fees and voting in network governance.

This article highlights what Polkadot staking is, how it works, how to stake DOT, its requirements and rewards, and why tokenholders should stake DOT.

What is Polkadot staking and how it works

Founded in 2016 as a layer-0 protocol and multichain network, Polkadot is a blockchain project introduced by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood.

A freshly unsealed indictment has charged five individuals with “conspiring to manipulate the market” in relation to an alleged scheme involving the ERC-20 Hydro (HYDRO) token.

An April 24 statement from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said the indictment charged three people for conspiring to manipulate the market for Hydro. Two other individuals were separately charged for their roles in the scheme.

The DOJ alleges that from June 2018 through April 2019, Michael Ross Kane, the former CEO of Hydrogen Technology Corp., Shane Hampton, Hydrogen’s chief of financial engineering and George Wolvaardt defrauded market participants looking to trade the Hydro tokens Hydrogen issued.

According to the indictment, Wolvaardt, who was the chief technology officer for a market-making firm called Moonwalkers Trading Limited designed a trading bot that executed a number of high-value “spoof orders” at obscure intervals to make it appear as though there was high demand for the token. The bot also bought and sold large volumes of the token from the same account — a practice known as wash trading.

Following the alleged artificial manipulation of the price of Hydro, the DOJ claims the co-conspirators sold large chunks of their holdings netting an approximate total of $2 million in ill-gotten profits.

Chainlink’s (LINK) low-latency oracles will integrate with the decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX following a successful governance proposal that sought to provide more “granular” real-time market data to GMX v2.

Voting ended on April 25 at 12:00 am UTC with over 96% of participating GMX token holders voting in favor of the proposal.

The new Chainlink oracles — which were built with the input of GMX core contributors — were brought in to improve upon the functionality of perpetual DEXs and price-sensitive trading on GMX, the author of the proposal explained.

In addition, the low-latency oracles are said to strengthen security, further decentralize the protocol and improve upon the user experience, Johann Eid, the head of integration at Chainlink Labs said.

While these new oracles utilize the same oracle node operators and data aggregation mechanisms used in existing Chainlink reference feeds, Eid explained that the new oracles extract data at a “higher frequency.”