Bitcoin has officially smashed through the $90,000 mark, a major psychological milestone. While many traders and investors are wondering whether it can hold this level, some analysts saw this breakout coming. Tools like Market Cipher showed bullish patterns on the weekly chart, and now eyes are on the $88,000 support zone to confirm sustainability.
Gold is soaring too, hitting an all-time high amid ongoing geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China regarding tariffs and trade deals. While some argue gold’s rally helped push Bitcoin, I believe Bitcoin was primed for a pump on its own.
On April 21, the Coinbase Derivatives platform launched two XRP futures products. The contracts, one standard (10,000 XRP) and one nano (500 XRP) are cash-settled and benchmarked to the MarketVector Coinbase XRP Index. These launches were approved by the CFTC earlier this month, thanks to Trump’s crypto-friendly U.S. administration.
Ripple’s ecosystem is also growing, especially in DeFi. The new RLUSD stablecoin, backed by Ripple and operating on both XRPL and Ethereum, is now integrated into Aave V3 on Ethereum. With $50M in supply and $5M available for borrowing, the current usage is modest, but the stablecoin has already reached a $294M market cap since its December launch.
In other altcoin news, apparently Go Gala Games (GALA) was used for The White House digital easter egg hunt, let’s see if they make a comeback!
Hedera (HBAR) is advancing in AI with the launch of agent-to-agent communication via the OpenConvAI Portal by Moonscape Labs. Now live on Hedera’s testnet, it offers ChatGPT-style interaction, monetization ready agents, and a unified directory of registered AI agents.
Related: Tariff Live Updates: Trump lashes on Jerome Powell, calls for his dismissal
In regulatory news, Paul Atkins was sworn in as the 34th SEC Chair. A long-time advocate for transparency and regulatory consistency, Atkins replaces Gary Gensler and is expected to introduce more pro-crypto policies and legislation. (We’ll see)
Michael Saylor made headlines again this week, as MicroStrategy acquired 6,556 more BTC (worth ~$555.8M at current prices) at an average price of $84,770. The company now owns 2.7% of the entire Bitcoin supply, representing 77% of all BTC held by public companies.
Finally, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin floated the idea of replacing the EVM with RISC-V to improve scalability and reduce on-chain costs by up to 100x. This upgrade would retain EVM compatibility and allow for interpreters to translate contracts, a move already explored by other blockchains like Polkadot.
