What happened in crypto in the past week? This week Bitcoin went down mostly, quite a bit, and weak hands sold, while long term holders bought. Ethereum looks shady lately. AI has potential. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: The same story, short term BTC holders are selling at loss, a similar pattern to mid-November 2025, after a 15% price drop. Long term Bitcoin holders are accumulating at a record pace, controlling 71.6% of the circulating supply right now. Bitcoin is stuck as US Bond yields hit a multi-decade high. Crypto Quant said that Bitcoin is following the same patter as in the 2022 bear market, preceeding a bigger decline. Mark Cuban sold most of its Bitcoin after it failed to act as a hedge during dollar weakness.
Ethereum: Harvard dropped ETH while sovereign funds bought more BTC ETF stakes. BTC now holds 60% of the crypto's value, with ETH near 10% and all other altcoins sitting at 30%. As ETH dropped to 2090 on May 18, a 12% pullback from its recent high, just had its worst week of ETF outflows this year. Vitalik published a personal post on May 24 addressing months of leadership exits at the Ethereum Foundation, saying that his own influence within the organisation will shrink intentionally, but the Foundation will plan to sell less ETH going forward.
Altcoins and stablecoins: Van Eck and Grayscale both filed updated BNB ETF registration statements with the SEC on May 16. The Clarity Act handed 16 tokens a path to commodity status (XRP, SOL, LINK, ADA, HBAR, even ICP may benefit from it). Revolut launched a physical Dogecoin-themed Debit Card. Hyperliquid is now letting you trade pre-ipo stocks on-chain. Funny enough, while the rest of the crypto falls, ZCash gained 18%. Two US spot HYPE ETFs pulled over $22M in their first week, outpacing ETH ETFs. Bitwise confirmed it will stake its HYPE holdings and use a portion of management fees to buy more of it. HYPE hit an all time high of $61.35 on May 21. Fireblocks built a payment system for AI agents. Near Protocol introduced Synamic Resharding, a protocol upgrade to enable shard addition automatically on demand, to support NEAR intents and AI agents.
NFTs and blockchain games: I have also enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with no significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new cards from the Escalation mini collection are up and running.
Good news: Saudi Arabia is tokenizing $12.5B in real world assets, starting with real estate and expanding into energy and manufacturing. At least eight major Japanese financial institutions are developing crypto investment trust products for retail investors. Standard Chartered bought its own crypto custody unit, the Zodia Custody company, after obtaining a Luxemburg MiCA custody license. Tether bought out SoftBank's stake in Twenty One Capital (Bitcoin treasury firm) on May 20. OpenAI is planning to go public in September with and IPO underwrited by Golman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Binance lets you trade SpaceX before its IPO.
Bad news: Crypto funds bled over a billion in one week, ending a six week positive streak. The pullback is market by rising Treasury yields, persistent inflation concerns, and uncertainty around the Middle East conflict. AI sector alone bleeds $2.8B as Anthropic shadow market spirals. Polymarket lets you bet on private companies speculating over valuation thresholdd and IPO timing without receiving any equity. Blockchain.com also files for an IPO in the US. The FTX law firm agreed to a settlement, the largest in the second wave of FTX class actions, of $54M to settle fraud claims. A single provision in the Clarity Act would bar platforms from paying yield for holding a digital asset, ending the passive hold-to-earn model. France accounts for roughly 70% of all globall crypto wrentch attacks, with 41 kidnappings in 2026 alone, the 2020 Ledger database leak is cited as a key turning point, with exposed home addresses of hundred of thousands of users.
Joke of the week: At the beginning of the last week strategy signalled its next BTC purchase. They are also pushing to vota a change to STRC divident timing before June 8. After they acquired nearly 25K BTC in one week, reaching 843K BTC, TD Cowen raised its Strategy price target to $400. Then, on May 24, Strategy started to buy bonds, not Bitcoin, to rebuild liquidity and manage liabilitie, following its plan to repurchase part of its own converible debt.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).
...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.
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