Autor Cointelegraph By Stephen Katte

Bitmine Immersion Technologies has purchased another $52 million worth of Ether (ETH), with its chair, Tom Lee, saying that the token’s price isn’t yet reflecting the Ethereum blockchain’s strengths.“Over the past week, we acquired 26,497 ETH,” Lee said in a statement on Monday. “In our view, ETH prices are not reflecting the strengthening of Ethereum fundamentals, but then again, this is not surprising given we are in the early stages of crypto spring.”Bitmine is the largest Ether treasury company with 5.4 million ETH worth more than $10.5 billion. It had slowed its pace of buying earlier this month after scooping up more than 100,000 Ether a week for three straight weeks.Source: BitmineEther is down 4.7% over the past week and has traded between $1,963 and $2,126, according to CoinGecko. It has traded mostly flat over the past day at just below $2,000.Lee told CNBC on Monday that there is disappointment in crypto at the moment because it hasn’t moved while other sectors like software are rallying, but argued that it “always happens at the end of crypto winter.”Related: Sharplink, Forward Industries among crypto firms considered for Russell indexesLee argued that the thesis for Bitcoin and Ethereum that he believes in still stands; that they are likely to be the future of money, despite the short-term price downturn across the market and some long-term holders and whales selling. “As AI systems evolve, we’re now talking about using commerce and operating websites, you need decentralized identity and verification, and that’s really what crypto does,” he said. “We know Wall Street wants to go toward tokenization; it’s a vast improvement in efficiency of how money actually moves, and it’s an innovation. That only happens on Bitcoin, Ethereum and other smart contracts. The future isn’t changed.”  Bitmine announced plans to build an Ether treasury in July 2025, aiming to hold 5% of the total circulating supply of 120.6 million tokens. Its current stash holds over 5.4 million tokens, roughly 90% to its target. Lee has said he expects the company to hit its goal sometime in 2026. Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies? Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

A $1.26 billion block trade in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) made last week was likely a whale making a quick exit on a directional trade, says Greg Cipolaro, the head of research at financial services company NYDIG.On Tuesday, an unknown trader sold 29.2 million shares of BlackRock’s IBIT on a dark pool, a private trading platform that institutions use to discreetly make large trades outside public markets, sparking speculation about who made the trade and why.Cipolaro said in a research note on Friday that several indicators were “consistent with a large directional holder exiting a concentrated position rather than a contemporaneous basis-trade unwind.”He added that the seller accepting the sale at $1.01 below the market price of $44.17, forgoing $29.5 million in exchange for immediate execution, and using a private trading platform, pointed to such a large directional holder exiting.Large transactions can move markets and affect overall sentiment. However, in this case, Bitcoin (BTC) slid 2.8% over the day after the trade. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said at the time the market absorbed the sale well despite the significant block sale.“The key unanswered question is whether the seller was responding to idiosyncratic constraints or expressing a broader investment view,” Cipolaro said.“While the transaction details themselves cannot answer that question, they do, however, demonstrate that at least one sophisticated holder was willing to pay approximately $29.5 million to eliminate a $1.26 billion bitcoin-linked position immediately.”US-listed Bitcoin ETFs have now recorded 11 straight trading days of net outflows, with a $333.6 million outflow on the same day as the massive IBIT trade, according to Farside Investors data. More than $2.9 billion has now flowed out from the ETFs since May 14, the last recorded net inflow across multiple funds.U.S.-listed Bitcoin ETFs have recorded 11 straight trading days of net outflows. Source: Farside InvestorsRelated: Bitcoin falls out of the global top 10 assets as market cap dips below $1.5T Meanwhile, sentiment has also been volatile. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which measures overall crypto market sentiment, returned a score of 29 out of 100 on Monday, indicating “fear” in the market. It also posted an average rating of “fear” for May.Cipolaro said the methods used by the whale entity to sell show urgency, but the motive remains unclear. He speculates that it could have been a forced sale driven by investor redemptions and balance-sheet constraints or an attempt to reduce the risk of exiting over multiple sessions.“Public data cannot distinguish conclusively between these explanations,” he said. “However, the weakening technical backdrop, ongoing ETF outflows, and willingness to pay a substantial execution premium for immediacy are more consistent with discretionary liquidation rather than investor redemptions or a portfolio rebalance.”Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?

The Sui Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Sui Network, says it has made a “major upgrade” to address issues that caused three recent outages and left the blockchain down for more than 15 hours across two days.Sui experienced an outage on Thursday that lasted nearly six hours and two more on Friday. The first lasted eight hours and 25 minutes while the second lasted 43 minutes, according to the Sui network’s uptime dashboard. All systems are listed as operational as of Monday.The Sui Foundation said in a blog post on Sunday that it applied an upgrade to fix the bugs that caused the outages. It also flagged several issues for improvement, such as better failure containment, end-of-epoch resilience and further investment in artificial intelligence agents, which helped with diagnoses, querying validator logs and assembling metrics.“As of now, validators have fully addressed the known issues caused by both the original gas-charging bug and the randomness-state bug, and network activity has resumed,” the Sui Foundation said. It added that “during the outages, no user funds were at risk, and the network did not revert any committed transactions when it resumed.”Source: SuiSui had a similar outage in January, which knocked the network offline for more than six hours. Another incident occurred in November 2024, when all validators were stuck in a crash loop for about 2.5 hours. Sui is the 13th-largest blockchain by total value locked at $519 million and hosts 137 protocols, according to DefiLlama.Bugs introduced during software updateThe Sui Foundation said the blockchain’s two most recent outages stemmed from “crash bugs” introduced in its 1.72 software release. The bugs impacted gas charging, causing the network to charge funds before canceling transactions for insufficient balances. This created negative balances that crashed the system An interim fix for the initial bug triggered the third outage. The fix aimed to bring the network back online until a permanent solution could be devised, but it had “a known issue with a low probability of causing a halt.”Related: CME Group expands crypto futures with Avalanche and Sui contracts The Sui (SUI) token has declined since the outages. It traded at about 99 cents on Thursday before the first outage, according to data from crypto aggregator CoinGecko. It has since dropped roughly 11% and is worth about 88 cents as of Monday.In early May, the token climbed 50% to $1.41 following several positive developments, including a Nasdaq-listed company staking a large portion of the supply.Sui launched its mainnet in May 2023, aiming to be scalable and capable of processing transactions fast enough for mainstream financial institutions.Magazine: HYPE chases $100 target, ETH could dump below $1800: Market Moves

Nearly half of the organizations onboarded into the crypto industry in 2026 are operating at alerting standards that would have made them industry leaders only a few years ago, according to Chainalysis.In a preview of a report published on Wednesday, Chainalysis said that the crypto industry’s compliance baseline around alert severity, trigger sensitivity and minimum dollar detection floors is tightening, with about 47% of organizations onboarded this year using alerting standards that would have placed them in the top 10% of strictness in 2020.It added that companies have become more uniform in direct monitoring, where funds arrive immediately from a known illicit source, but there is still a gap with indirect monitoring, where the funds pass through intermediary addresses.Compliance-alerting standards have improved significantly across the industry over the last few years. Source: ChainalysisThe industry has been raising its security and compliance in response to stricter regulations and growing threats from hackers. North Korean-affiliated hackers alone were responsible for an estimated $2 billion in crypto losses in 2025.Chainalysis said that in 2020, the industry was still establishing norms, with only 10% meeting the top requirements. However, the rate started increasing in 2023, and now “newer entrants are launching with more aggressive monitoring.”“This is a sign of rapid ecosystem maturation. Standard compliance configurations today would have been considered industry-leading just five years ago. The industry financial institutions are joining has already built substantial compliance infrastructure, and the bar continues to rise.” Crypto has a gap in indirect monitoringLegacy financial institutions have lower triggering thresholds for indirect exposure to both illicit and non-illicit fund flows and are alerted to smaller sums. On average, crypto exchanges set much higher alerting thresholds, and the thresholds vary across categories, according to Chainalysis.Related: Coinbase execs face new lawsuit seeking damages, insider profit clawbacksCategories such as ransomware, fraud shops, scams and darknet markets often have indirect thresholds 10 to 20 times higher than their direct equivalents.“The industry’s gap between direct and indirect monitoring creates an opening for illicit actors to exploit. Organizations that close this gap improve their regulatory defensibility and differentiate themselves as trustworthy counterparties,” the Chainalysis team said.“The data in this chapter point to an industry in transition, one that has professionalized its approach to direct exposure but which may not yet be treating indirect risk with equivalent rigor.”Magazine: Polymarket seeks Japan entry, Harvard dumps entire ETH position: Hodler’s Digest, May 17 – 23    

US authorities have charged a Google employee with allegedly using information from the company to make bets on Polymarket and profit $1.2 million.The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it unsealed charges against Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo, accusing him of accessing unreleased internal information at Google and placing 25 bets worth $2.7 million on markets related to the most searched individuals on Google in 2025.Prosecutors said Spagnuolo owned the Polymarket account “AlphaRaccoon”, which profited $1.2 million on “outcomes that the market treated as unlikely” when Google published information on the most searched individuals in December.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a twin complaint against Spagnuolo on Wednesday, making similar allegations of insider trading.Prediction markets are facing growing scrutiny over insider trading, with Congress launching a probe into Polymarket and Kalshi on Friday, questioning the companies’ response to incidents of insider trading on the platform, with lawmakers concerned that government officials are using insider knowledge to make bets.Manhattan US District Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement that the charges “reinforce a decades-old message: Corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets.”Source: US Attorney Southern District of New York AlphaRaccoon account allegedly changed name According to the court documents, communities on Discord and X started discussing the possibility that AlphaRaccoon was a Google insider in December. Soon after, the username was allegedly changed to a wallet address.Prosecutors alleged that the funds in the AlphaRaccoon account were also sent to a decentralized crypto swapping service and to an unnamed transfer service that offers privacy protection for blockchain transactionsThe Justice Department charged Spagnuolo with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, and could face a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison.Related: Polymarket traders win $37K after Paris weather data glitch, raising suspicionIn its complaint, the CFTC seeks restitution, disgorgement, civil monetary penalties and trading and registration bans. CFTC director of enforcement, David Miller, said in a statement that “the division is a cop on the beat in policing the illegal use of inside information in the prediction markets and other markets within the CFTC’s jurisdiction.”Source: CFTC“We will continue to take action to protect markets from insider trading and other forms of fraud, abuse and manipulation,” Miller added.It comes after the Justice Department charged a US soldier in April with using classified information to place bets on the US capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.Magazine: ETH bears growling, Tom Lee’s buying, XRP to ‘explode’: Market Moves