Autor Cointelegraph By Jesse Coghlan

Shares in the US crypto exchange Bullish fell on Thursday after the company’s first-quarter earnings missed analysts’ top and bottom line expectations.Bullish’s adjusted revenue for the quarter ended March 31 was $92.8 million, up from $62.4 million a year ago, but below Wall Street expectations of $95.4 million.The company reported a net loss of $604.9 million, deeper than its $348.6 million loss in the prior-year period. Its adjusted earnings per share were 13 cents, below estimates of 17 cents.Bullish is the latest crypto company to report an earnings miss after the wider crypto market fell from January to March, with Bitcoin falling 24% over the quarter, according to CoinGecko.Shares of Bullish (BLSH) fell 5.6% during Thursday’s trading session to close at $39.46, then rose 1% in after-hours trading.Shares in Bullish dropped on Thursday on the company’s first-quarter results. Source: Google FinanceBullish’s stock has lost 43% since the company went public in August but is up 4.2% so far this year.The company told investors its recent $4.2 billion acquisition of Equiniti would allow it to bring to market a “regulated transfer agent with end-to-end tokenization infrastructure” and claimed to be the second-place exchange for Bitcoin options, two areas that are currently seeing a surge of interest.Related: Strategy’s Bitcoin engine faces $28B STRC ceiling: Delphi Digital“With the proposed acquisition of Equiniti, we will have all three elements required to become a powerhouse leading the blockchain era,” said Bullish CEO Tom Farley. “End-to-end tokenization services, a unified transfer agent ledger, and broad blue-chip issuer relationships.”Bullish’s results came the same day rival exchange Gemini reported a mixed first quarter, with revenue of $50.3 million missing estimates while its net loss of $109 million exceeded expectations.Coinbase also missed consensus after it reported its first-quarter earnings last week, with $1.41 billion in revenue missing expectations of $1.5 billion, while its $394.1 million net loss, its second consecutive quarterly loss, also fell short of forecasts.Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs: Mid-2026

Crypto data company Dune said it is laying off 25% of its workforce, citing a need to restructure its business to focus on its core products.“We’re restructuring Dune to sharpen our focus around the core data products thousands of customers across the crypto industry rely on,” Dune co-founder and CEO Fredrik Haga posted to X on Thursday. “That unfortunately means we’ve let 25% of the team go this week.”Haga did not share the number of staff who were laid off. The company’s LinkedIn shows about 150 employees. Haga said the company remained “well capitalized” and that Dune was “all-in” on artificial intelligence and growing institutional interest in crypto.Layoffs and closures are rising across the crypto and tech sectors this year, with many companies citing AI as both a help and a hindrance.Just this month, Coinbase cut 700 employees, or about 14% of its workforce, on May 5, citing an increase in AI use, while the crypto news outlet DL News shuttered on Friday, citing part of the reason was decreased reach in internet search results due to AI aggregation.Haga said that Dune’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which allows AI to interact with the platform, means “teams and agents can now build dashboards and workflows without needing to know anything” about data infrastructure or SQL, a programming language for databases.Source: Fredrik HagaHe added the company would also be “investing heavily” in its data products and services for institutions, as the company sees “currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities and more” are moving onchain.Related: How AI became crypto’s favorite reason to cut staffDune’s cutbacks add to the more than 5,000 jobs eliminated at major crypto companies this year.Block Inc. undertook the biggest round of layoffs of a crypto company so far in 2026, halving its workforce and cutting 4,000 staff in February.The crypto exchanges Gemini and Crypto.com also laid off 200 and around 180 employees, respectively, earlier this year, with each citing the rising use of AI for efficiency gains.Layoffs are also widespread in the US tech sector, with 137 companies cutting nearly 109,000 jobs so far in 2026, according to data from Layoffs.fyi.Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs: Mid-2026

Bitcoin is at risk of falling into a downtrend after its price hit a key historical “major bear market resistance level” based on its 200-day moving average, according to the crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant.The cryptocurrency hit its 200-day moving average of $82,400 after rallying over six weeks since early April when it fell to $66,000, CryptoQuant said in a report on Wednesday.“The 200-day MA [moving average] was a major resistance in the 2022 bear market: the price resumed its downward trend after hitting it in March of that year,” it said. “The current setup raises the question of whether history repeats.”Several traders have recently forecast a Bitcoin rally if the US Senate moves forward with the long-awaited CLARITY Act, while others have pointed to additional money printing in the US as a tailwind for Bitcoin this year. CryptoQuant’s signals point to the opposite. Adding to CryptoQuant’s bearish outlook, traders’ unrealized profit margins reached 17.7% on May 5, their highest level since June last year, which the firm said indicated “potential selling pressure to take profits.”“These margin levels mirror those seen in March 2022, precisely when Bitcoin last tested the 200-day MA before resuming its decline,” CryptoQuant said.Bitcoin has fallen 2.3% in the last 24 hours to $79,300 after enjoying a rally since early April as traders returned to riskier assets on potentially easing Middle East tensions.Bitcoin has also become increasingly sensitive to the US economy as Wall Street adoption has grown, with its latest dip coming after the US Labor Department said Wednesday that producer prices jumped 1.4% in April, the biggest increase in four years and another sign of rising inflation.Source: CryptoQuantRelated: Whale shorts $70M in crypto and tech: Should Bitcoin traders worry?Traders may have already started taking profits, as the report said daily realized profits jumped to their highest level since early December last week, with traders cashing out 14,600 Bitcoin, currently worth nearly $1.2 billion, on May 4.“Historically, spikes of this magnitude in bear market rallies have preceded local price tops,” CryptoQuant said.It added that if Bitcoin falls, its current level of price support sits around $70,000, which is the average price at which all Bitcoin was last transacted.“This level has historically acted as a key resistance-turned-support band during bear markets,” CryptoQuant said. “It represents the average cost basis of short-term traders and the level at which unrealized profit margins compress back toward zero, reducing the incentive for further selling.”Other analysts have remained bullish on Bitcoin, with MN Capital founder Michaël van de Poppe posting on X on Wednesday that the cryptocurrency “might see a fast move” to $90,000 if the US Senate advances a long-awaited crypto bill dubbed the CLARITY Act.Arthur Hayes, the investment chief of the crypto fund Maelstrom, said on Tuesday that Bitcoin retaking its all-time peak of $126,000 was a “foregone conclusion.” He predicted that the war in Iran and competition between the US and China over artificial intelligence would lead the government to increase the money supply, causing inflation that would push traders toward Bitcoin.Magazine: eToro founder timed Bitcoin top perfectly due to belief in 4-year cycles

Just 4% of surveyed Americans say they would weigh a political candidate’s stance on crypto policy in deciding who to vote for.Affordable housing, consumer fraud protection and lower bank fees were the top three issues respondents said they wanted Congress to tackle, according to a survey of 2,035 US adults released on Wednesday by POLITICO and conducted by polling firm Public First.Just 18% of respondents considered establishing rules for the crypto market a top priority for Congress, just one percentage point ahead of regulating large banks.The results show a divide between the average American voter’s top priorities and those of crypto industry lobbyists, who have been pushing Congress to pass crypto legislation ahead of the midterm elections.Crypto lobbies poured more than $130 million into the 2024 elections, the most of any industry, and have already spent $320 million to influence the November midterms, according to data compiled by researcher Molly White.Crypto lobbyists have made it clear that they will use their significant funds against any candidate who doesn’t support the industry, having spent over $5.5 million on opposing candidates in congressional races in Illinois this year.Less than a third oppose making crypto mainstreamAccording to the survey, just 27% said they support or strongly support the US government taking action to legitimize crypto as a mainstream financial asset, while 31% said they oppose or strongly oppose it. Poll responses to whether the US government should legitimize crypto as a mainstream asset. Source: POLITICORelated: Crypto and AI could be dirty words on 2026 midterm campaign trail“Most voters don’t care about digital assets,” Republican Representative Dusty Johnson told POLITICO. “But those who do care a lot. It is a high-intensity issue. And I think it’s going a little bit more mainstream. The number of people who ask me about it is still very small, but I would say growing.”More than half of the respondents said they had not, and would not, consider trading crypto, while 19% had traded crypto. Of those who trade crypto, 7% said a political candidate’s stance on crypto would impact their vote.The poll also found that 45% of respondents viewed investing in crypto as a risk not worth taking, even if it offered high returns, compared with 25% who said it was worth it.The latest poll clashes with another poll of 2,008 registered voters released on Friday by HarrisX, which found 47% said they would be at least somewhat likely to consider voting for a candidate outside their preferred party if the candidate supported passing a long-awaited crypto bill that would lay out how the industry is regulated.The Senate Banking Committee on Thursday will vote on whether to advance such a bill that has seen involvement from the White House to cut a deal with crypto and banking lobbies. A version of the bill passed the House in June as the CLARITY Act.Magazine: Clarity Act risks repeat of Europe’s mistakes, crypto lawyer warns

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has backed Kalshi in the company’s legal fight against the state of Ohio, asking an appeals court to affirm that the regulator has jurisdiction over prediction markets.The CFTC filed an amicus brief in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, accusing Ohio of “jurisdictional overreach” after state authorities told Kalshi last year to stop offering sports event contracts in the state, calling them unlicensed sports gambling.Kalshi sued Ohio authorities in October, seeking to have a federal court stop the Ohio Casino Control Commission and the state attorney general from taking action, but the court denied the request in March, leading Kalshi to appeal the decision.“The federal district court in Ohio took an improperly narrow view of the Commission’s jurisdiction, and we are asking the Court of Appeals to correct that error,” CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said in a statement. “As I’ve said repeatedly, the CFTC will not allow overzealous state governments to undermine the agency’s longstanding authority over these markets.”The dispute is one of many similar cases determining whether states have the power to restrict federally regulated prediction markets and has implications for major prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket. The CFTC’s latest amicus brief is its second backing a prediction market after it filed one in the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court in February supporting Crypto.com in a legal battle against regulators in Nevada.In its brief, the CFTC argued that “Ohio’s jurisdictional overreach into the Commission’s sphere threatens regulatory upheaval,” as the agency oversees event contracts trading as swaps or binary options on designated contract markets (DCMs).Source: Mike Selig“If States can restrict event contracts on sports, the Commission’s longstanding jurisdiction over these other event contracts could be imperiled too,” it wrote. “The Court should enforce the Commission’s exclusive jurisdiction and hold that Ohio cannot regulate event contracts traded on DCMs.” Related: Prediction market battle gets closer to Supreme CourtThe CFTC’s brief comes after it sued five states to assert its jurisdiction over prediction markets, launching action against regulators in Wisconsin, New York, Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois.The states had either sent cease-and-desist letters or had sued the prediction markets Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com, Robinhood, and Coinbase, all of which are CFTC-regulated DCMs, over their offering of sports event contracts.“States cannot circumvent the clear directive of Congress,” Selig said last month after the CFTC sued Wisconsin. “Our message to Wisconsin is the same as to New York, Arizona, and others: if you interfere with the operation of federal law in regulating financial markets, we will sue you.”Magazine: Should users be allowed to bet on war and death in prediction markets?