BNB Trades in Tight Range Amid Decreasing Volatility

The cryptocurrency market continues to navigate complex global economic conditions as BNB trades within a tight consolidation range between $636-$646, according to CoinDesk Research's technical analysis data model.

The token's price action shows resilience amid international trade disputes, with higher lows forming since recent dips while resistance remains firm around the $643-$645 zone.

Decreasing volume volatility suggests energy buildup for a potential breakout, though direction remains uncertain as traders closely monitor both technical patterns and macroeconomic developments affecting market sentiment.

Technical Analysis Highlights

• BNB traded within a narrow $9.67 range (1.52%) between $636.25 and $645.92 over 24 hours.
• Price formed a series of higher lows since the 13:00 dip, establishing support around $638-$640.
• Resistance emerged near $643-$645 with notable volume spikes during recovery rallies.
• Closing price of $642.59 suggests a neutral-to-slightly-bullish bias as BNB maintains position above mid-range.
• Decreasing volume volatility indicates potential energy buildup for a more decisive move.
• In the last hour, BNB showed bullish momentum, climbing from $641.21 to $643.09 (0.29% gain).
• Significant volume spikes occurred during upward moves at 01:54-01:55 when BNB broke above $642.60.
• A brief pullback to $640.57 at 01:32 established a strong support zone with aggressive buying.
• Hourly close showed consolidation near the high, suggesting potential uptrend continuation.
• Immediate resistance sits at $643.25.

Disclaimer: This article was generated with AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy. This article may include information from external sources, which are listed below when applicable.

source https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/18/bnb-trades-in-tight-range-amid-decreasing-volatility

Alchemy Acquires Solana Developer DexterLab for Undisclosed Sum

Blockchain development platform Alchemy said it has acquired Solana developer DexterLab for an undisclosed fee.

The acquisition will accelerate the development of Solana-based Web3 applications to meet growing enterprise demand, Alchemy said in an emailed announcement on Friday.

DexterLab's technology has previously powered the Solana development of Google and the Solana Foundation, establishing itself as "a go-to infrastructure provider," according to Alchemy's announcement.

One of Alchemy's aims in acquiring DexterLab is to consolidate Solana development alongside that of Ethereum to reduce complexity for projects building across multiple networks.

Alchemy may be be attempting to capture the growing prominence of Solana as a preferred venue for blockchain applications.

While Ethereum remains comfortably the larger blockchain in terms of total-value locked, there are some metrics where Solana can claim the ascendancy. For example, active addresses on Solana have been over 210 million in the last three months while Ethereum and Ethereum Layer-2 addresses are just below 80 million. Transactions on Solana have also outnumbered Ethereum: 4.75 billion to 1 billion.

Read More: Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital Swaps $100M ETH for SOL, On-Chain Data Shows

source https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/16/alchemy-acquires-solana-developer-dexterlab-for-undisclosed-sum

Crypto Miners Soar on OpenAI-CoreWeave Deal; Galaxy Jumps in Nasdaq Debut

While cryptocurrencies put in a flattish performance on Friday with bitcoin BTC churning around $104,000, crypto-related stocks were having a moment to shine.

Crypto mining and data center firms such as Cipher Mining (CIFR), Hive Digital (HIVE), Hut 8 (HUT) and TeraWulf (WULF) booked 10%-20% gains on optimism about artificial intelligence (AI) computing demand, jolted by CoreWeave (CRWV) signing a $4 billion deal with ChatGPT-developer OpenAI. These firms are often seen as proxies for AI-linked infrastructure bets due to their data center assets.

For its part, CoreWeave soared more than 26%.

The rally extended to Galaxy Digital (GLXY), which rose 8% on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, marking the firm’s long-awaited U.S. market debut. The company, previously only listed in Toronto, manages crypto investments and trades digital assets and also has a data center business.

Crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) rebounded 9% after a sharp drop Thursday triggered by customer data breach and ongoing regulatory scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Read more: Market Reaction to Coinbase Hack ‘Overblown,’ Say Analysts as SEC Probe Sinks COIN

DeFi Development (DFDV), the real estate tech firm with a Solana SOL treasury strategy, surged 45% to fresh record highs on news of striking a validator operation deal with memecoin BONK BONK and adding more SOL tokens to its balance sheet.

Meanwhile, BTC held just above $104,000, up 1.3% over the 24 hours, while ether ETH gained 2.3% to $2,580. The broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index was flat, with XRP XRP underperforming as a U.S. judge rejected the settlement proposal between Ripple and the SEC.

Inflation expectations through the roof

On the macro front, the University of Michigan’s latest inflation survey showed consumers expect 1-year inflation to rise to 7.3%, up from 6.5%, the highest since the 1980s, while expectations for 5-10 years ticked up to 4.6%, a multi-decade high.

"It's so high it doesn't make sense," Louis Navellier, chief investment officer of money management firm Navellier said in a market note.

Responses showed staggering divergence in outlooks by political affiliations, with the Republican outlook for far tamer inflation. Traditional markets, consequently, shrugged off the data, with major U.S. stock indices climbing higher towards the latter hours of the session.

However, rising inflation expectations may have a second-order impact on markets by discouraging Fed policymakers from cutting rates in the next months.

"The concern here is that the Fed has expressed interest in consumer expectations on inflation, and with their concern about the potential of tariff-fueled inflation, it may give them further reason to pause," Navellier said.

source https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/16/crypto-miners-soar-on-openai-coreweave-deal-galaxy-jumps-in-nasdaq-debut

Bitcoin Holds Above $100K, Altcoins Slide as Analyst Sees Crypto Rally Into Summer

The crypto rally took a long-overdue pause on Thursday as traders took some profits following weeks of relentless advance that lifted bitcoin BTC close to record prices.

The consolidation occurred amid a slew of U.S. economic data releases. April retail sales missed expectations, producer prices rose less than forecast, jobless claims stayed on track, while the NY Empire State Manufacturing Index and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey showed softening business activity—signals that did little to rattle traditional markets. The S&P 500 added 0.4%, while the Nasdaq finished flat.

Bitcoin pulled back to $101,000 early in the U.S. session before rebounding above $103,000 later, modestly down over the past 24 hours.

Altcoins fared worse with the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index declining 3% during the same period. Native tokens of Aptos APT, Avalanche AVAX and Uniswap UNI tumbled 6%-7%.

Crypto investors shouldn't sweat today's pullback, analysts told CoinDesk.

"The current pullback appears to be a correction within a broader medium-term uptrend," said Ruslan Lienkha, chief of markets at YouHodler.

The upward momentum in equity markets moderated after the China-U.S. tariff delay, and short-term traders began locking in profits, he said. "This shift in sentiment has spilled over into riskier assets, including BTC."

"Anything below 5% [price move] can often be considered just market noise," said Kirill Kretov, trading automation expert at CoinPanel. "Some of this movement likely comes from profit-taking, as traders secure gains after the recent rally. With liquidity so thin, even modest sell-offs can quickly translate into noticeable corrections."

Backing away from short-term movements, the broader price action seems healthy with no clear signs of an imminent top.

Vetle Lunde, senior analyst at K33 Research, said BTC just exited one of its longest periods of below-neutral funding rates, a signal of defensive positioning

"This resembles the risk-averse patterns from October 2023 and 2024 and is far from resembling price action near past local market peaks," wrote Lunde, who was optimistic that the lack of froth with BTC above $100,000 BTC paves the way for potential fresh record highs.

According to Steno Research, crypto tailwinds stem from a stealth expansion in private credit—especially in the U.S. and Europe. In past bull runs, crypto thrived on base money expansion: massive injections of reserves by central banks that fueled asset inflation across the board. This time, however, the balance sheets of the Fed and European Central Bank have continued shrinking through quantitative tightening.

“Many have pointed to China’s liquidity injections as the primary driver of the rally,” Samuel Shiffman wrote in a Thursday report. “But that misses the mark. The real support is coming from Western bank credit growth—a quieter, less visible engine behind this move.”

He said that forward-looking indicators project global financial conditions improving into the summer months, driven primarily by the U.S. dollar weakening. This has historically lead to higher BTC prices.

"We’ve likely got room through June and into early July before the picture begins to change," Shiffman said. "But once we approach the back half of July, the setup gets trickier. Our leading indicators suggest that the peak in financial easing might not last past August."

source https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/15/bitcoin-holds-above-usd100k-altcoins-slide-as-analyst-sees-crypto-rally-into-summer

‘Really Great Example’: Coinbase Praised for Hack Response Amid $400M Crisis

The global head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics firm that helps law enforcement investigate crypto fraud, shared that he believes Coinbase’s handling of the latest hack is a “really great example to other businesses in terms of how to handle” dealing with hacks of exchanges.

At a panel at Consensus 2025, Ari Redbord discussed how easy it is for hacks to happen on crypto exchanges, as the industry is “the perfect storm of weak cyber controls and ultimately it's a good target.”

Coinbase shared earlier on Thursday that some of its staff had been bribed to steal their customers' data, and its founder Brian Armstrong had received a ransome note for $20 million dollars in bitcoin.

The team shared in a blog post that because of the breach, it could pay up to $400 million in remediation costs to affected customers, and that they were setting up a $20 million bounty on any information related to the attackers instead.

The news comes as the industry has experienced other major hacks, like Bybit which was hacked earlier this year for $1.5 billion, and defunct crypto exchange FTX in November 2022 for $400 million.

Though these episodes seem to happen frequently, Redbord believes more regulatory involvement can alleviate some of these issues. “There's a lot we can do with governments in order to go after these bad actors that have nothing to do with crypto or blockchain intelligence,” he said. “We have cyber facilities.”

Read more: Coinbase Could Pay Customers Up to $400M for Data Breach

source https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-toronto-2025-coverage/2025/05/15/really-great-example-coinbase-praised-for-hack-response-amid-usd400m-crisis

Senate's New Stablecoin Draft Doesn't Target Trump's Crypto, Tweaks Big-Tech Approach

The latest draft of the U.S. Senate's stablecoin legislation includes enough changes that Democratic senators may now have an easier time getting back on board, though consumer advocates say it still falls short.

The bill to set oversight and standards for stablecoin issuers sailed through the Senate Banking Committee with wide bipartisan support in March, but it hit a wall on the Senate floor last week as many Democrats raised objections. Chief among them were the conflicts that may be presented by President Donald Trump's own crypto interests and the possibility that big technology firms like Meta and social-media site X may be able to issue such tokens.

"As the result of hard-fought negotiations, Democrats won major victories on a range of critical issues," proponents noted in a summary circulated with the draft bill. The question remaining is: Will it be enough to get back to a so-called cloture vote that will advance the bill to a floor debate that would mark its final major stage before the Senate takes a vote.

The next procedural move on the Senate floor could come by next week, according to people familiar with the talks.

The latest changes to the bill represent a mixed bag. The loudest requests from critics, that the president be explicitly stopped from personally benefiting from the crypto industry that his administration will regulate, were not directly addressed in this version of the bill.

But on the concerns over tech giants sprouting with a field of new dollar-based tokens, the bill dealt with it in part:

"A public company that is not predominantly engaged in one or more financial activities, and its wholly or majority owned subsidiaries or affiliates, may not issue a payment stablecoin unless the public company obtains a unanimous vote of the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee," according to the latest draft. The committee would be a multi-agency group created under the legislation to look at such requests.

There are major loopholes in that, according to Mark Hays, who focuses on crypto and financial-technology issues for Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. For starters, he said, it affects only public companies and not private ones, such as X and TiKTok.

"There's already a way that large tech firms that aren't public could become issuers without adhering to these new standards," he said. Also, he added, "it's quite possible under this bill that a public company could secure an interest in a non-public company, and that's another way around it."

He argued that this overall draft gave toothless answers to the concern of consumer advocates.

"Pushing this through on an arbitrary deadline because the crypto industry is breathing down your neck is not a good way to make policy," Hays said. "And it's especially bad when that policy could further enable and enrich the president."

Bo Hines, one of Trump's chief advisers on crypto, appeared at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on Wednesday to insist that there's no conflict in the president's business interests or his family's involvement in the industry, including its stake in World Liberty Financial. He said that Trump "can't be bought."

The White House's Hines, who acts as a liaison to Capitol Hill during the legislative negotiations, expressed continued confidence about the effort staying on track in the Senate.

"Negotiations are ongoing," Hines said at Consensus. "But I remain steadfast in my optimism that we're going to achieve — the president's desire is to do it — both stablecoin legislation and market structure legislation before the August recess."

source https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05/15/senate-s-new-stablecoin-draft-doesn-t-target-trump-s-crypto-tweaks-big-tech-approach

Pantera's Dan Morehead Sees Decades of Bitcoin Upside Ahead

Bitcoin’s (BTC) long-term potential remains largely untapped, according to Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, who took the Mainstage at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on Wednesday.

“There are a couple more decades to go of outsized returns in bitcoin,” Morehead told the audience, underscoring Pantera’s ongoing conviction in the asset class.

Morehead offered a rare look into Pantera’s performance metrics, noting that the firm has turned a profit on 86% of its portfolio companies. Pantera has also invested in 22 startups that have gone on to achieve “unicorn” status with valuations exceeding $1 billion.

To capture opportunities in a fast-evolving landscape, Morehead recommended investors adopt a broad-based approach. “We advise investing in a wide spectrum of tokens and venture equity,” he said.

On the same panel at Consensus, Dan Tapiero, founder and CEO of 10T and 1RT, shared a sobering view on deal flow and valuations.

“In this space, founders think they should be raising capital at 50 to 70 times revenue,” Tapiero said, calling the expectations “unrealistic.”

Tapiero said his firm passed on approximately 200 investment opportunities in recent years, including some companies they genuinely liked. “We automatically passed on a lot of these deals because the price was just too high,” he noted.

Among those they declined? FTX, Celsius, and BlockFi, all three of which later collapsed amid scandals and market turmoil.

Morehead also addressed the increasingly international nature of crypto activity. “Ninety percent of crypto trading and protocols are based outside the U.S.—which isn't right,” he said. He blamed regulatory inertia for the exodus but expressed optimism that change is underway.

“The election win was a huge unlock,” Morehead said, referring to recent U.S. political shifts. “We’re coming back to what should have been, the last 6 to 8 years was a weird anomaly.” He hopes the coming years will see capital and innovation flow back into the U.S. crypto sector.

Read more: '$500K Bitcoin Would Seal It': Scaramucci Says Crypto Is on the Cusp of Becoming an Asset Class

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

source https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-toronto-2025-coverage/2025/05/14/pantera-s-dan-morehead-sees-decades-of-bitcoin-upside-ahead