MarketWhisper

On April 24, the Hong Kong High Court’s seven-member jury, by a majority vote, found not guilty of allegations against Chen Bo-liang, a former senior manager of cryptocurrency exchange Huobi (now renamed HTX), concerning accusations that he used a pseudonymous personal account in 2020 to trade on Huobi’s platform dark pool. The court also ruled not guilty on all charges, including six counts of accessing a computer with criminal or dishonest intent and one count of money laundering. The amount involved relates to 5 million Tether (USDT) tokens.

The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office (Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office) formally indicted the head of Wanli Development Company, Hong Yuepeng, and six branch managers from Taichung Bank on April 23, for a total of seven people. The alleged offenses include violations of the Banking Act (aggravated special breach of trust), the Anti–Money Laundering Act (the crime of large-amount money laundering), and related offenses under the Organized Crime Prevention Act. According to the indictment referenced by the United News Network from the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office, the case involves illegal funds flows totaling NT$3.64 billion.

According to the latest statistics provided by the Securities and Futures Bureau of the Financial Supervisory Commission, as of the end of March 2026, a total of 14 securities firms in Taiwan have launched virtual asset ETF cross-border/overseas custody (futures commission) re-delegation business, with cumulative trading exceeding NT$9.9B. Huang Zhonghao, Deputy Director of the Securities and Futures Bureau of Taiwan, stated that the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) has required the securities firms’ association to submit an assessment report on the performance of the virtual asset ETF cross-border/overseas custody (futures commission) re-delegation business over the past year, and that the assessment will expand eligibility to retail investors.

American independent senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont posted on the X platform on April 24, citing a report published in the January issue of The New Yorker, listing a breakdown of the income allegedly earned by the Trump family through cryptocurrency, Gulf transactions, and other sources, with an estimated total of $4.05 billion.

According to an official press release issued by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul on April 23, Wisconsin has sued Kalshi in Dane County, alleging that the platform’s prediction market business, which operates in the form of “event contracts,” falls within the legal definition of gambling under Wisconsin law and constitutes an unlicensed gambling activity.

According to data released by SoSoValue on April 24, as of April 23 in U.S. Eastern Time, the total net inflow for U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs on a single day reached $223 million, marking the seventh consecutive day of net inflows. On the same day, spot Ethereum ETFs recorded a total net outflow of $75.9360 million.

Trading firm Jane Street filed a motion to dismiss in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, seeking dismissal of the insider trading lawsuit brought by Terraform Labs’ bankruptcy administrator, and asking the court to close the case with prejudice and bar Terraform from bringing the same lawsuit again. In its motion, Jane Street argued that the Terraform fraud scheme has already been tried in court and penalized, and that the complaint is internally inconsistent.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the White House, in an official statement released on April 23 by Presidential Assistant Michael J. Kratsios, said that the Trump administration has information indicating that foreign entities (mainly based in China) are intentionally targeting major U.S. artificial intelligence companies. They are systematically extracting U.S. AI model capabilities through “tens of thousands of agent accounts” and jailbreaking technology, and are simultaneously announcing four response measures.

According to Cointelegraph’s report on April 24, Morgan Stanley has launched the “Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio,” a government money market fund designed specifically for stablecoin issuers, whose structure complies with the proposed 100% reserve backing requirements of the “GENIUS Act.”

According to the Q1 2026 Bitcoin Quarterly Report released by ARK Invest on April 24, the holdings of Bitcoin “confidence buyers” increased from 2.13 million BTC to 3.60 million BTC, up 69% quarter-over-quarter. ARK Invest said that the key support range for the cyclical bottom as defined by the firm ($54,000 to $50,000) was not tested by the end of the first quarter.

DeepSeek officially launched the V4 preview series on April 24, with open-sourced model weights under the MIT license, and the model weights have been also released on Hugging Face and ModelScope. According to the DeepSeek V4 technical report, V4-Pro-Max (the highest inference intensity mode) scored 3206 points on the Codeforces benchmark, surpassing GPT-5.4.

Meta Platforms’ chief human resources officer, Janelle Gale, released an official memo on Thursday confirming that the company plans to lay off about 8,000 employees on May 20, or roughly 10% of its total workforce, and will also pause its plans to fill 6,000 open positions. That same day, Microsoft disclosed a voluntary retirement plan for about 7% of U.S. employees, marking the first time the company has introduced such a program in its 51-year history.

According to Brazilian local media PipeLine, which reported on April 22, the venture capital arm of one of Brazil’s largest banks, Itaú Unibanco (Itau Unibanco), Itaú Ventures (Itau Ventures), has invested in the mobile data center and Bitcoin mining company Minter. The amount has not been officially disclosed; the report said it could be as high as 10 million US dollars to build Bitcoin mining facilities in Brazil and the United States.

Tencent officially open-sourced the Hy3 preview version of a large language model on April 23 on GitHub, Hugging Face, and the ModelScope platform, and simultaneously provided paid API service via Tencent Cloud. According to Decrypt’s report on April 24, the Hy3 preview version began training in late January and reached the publication calendar in less than three months.

According to an official announcement released by Metaplanet Inc. on April 24, the Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed company Metaplanet announced the issuance of its 20th tranche of unsecured ordinary bonds, with a total issuance amount of 8 billion yen (approximately 50 million US dollars). EVO FUND will subscribe for the full amount, and the funds raised will be used to purchase Bitcoin (BTC).

Galaxy Digital’s research chief Alex Thorn said in an analysis posted on the X platform on April 23 that Strategy (MSTR)’s bitcoin holdings have become the largest bitcoin-holding institution globally, predicting that the company could most quickly surpass Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated 1,096,000 bitcoins in holdings as early as November 2026.

Pi Network unveiled the Pi Token Design Framework PiRC1 on April 22 as part of the Protocol V22 upgrade. PiRC1’s core rule is: only projects that already have deployable applications within the Pi ecosystem and that have real user demand are eligible to issue tokens. Token proceeds do not flow to the project team; instead, they flow into a perpetual liquidity pool anchored by Pi Coin to prevent rug-pull behavior.

One of Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Zondacrypto, announced on April 16 via social media that its CEO, Przemysław Kral, said the exchange could not access a wallet holding 4,503 bitcoins, worth more than $350 million in current value. Kral published the address of the wallet in question to rebut allegations of misappropriation, but this disclosure immediately triggered a large-scale withdrawal.