Institutional-Crypto Convergence Accelerates (2026-05-28)

VanEck’s tokenized VBILL US Treasury fund can now be used as collateral on Euler

VanEck’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, VBILL, can now be used as collateral on decentralized lending protocol Euler, expanding the utility of the onchain U.S. Treasuries investment vehicle.

According to an announcement on Thursday, Securitize launched VBILL live on a Euler lending market curated by KPK. Users can now deposit their VBILL tokens to borrow other crypto assets against them and participate in DeFi strategies while still earning the fund’s Treasury yield.

“VBILL’s availability on Euler is another step in connecting tokenized Treasury exposure to DeFi infrastructure. The integration reflects how institutional-grade assets and decentralized lending markets are beginning to work together onchain,” VanEck Product Manager Jon Casterline said.

The move builds on Securitize’s DS Protocol, which was previously integrated with Euler. The protocol offers a blockchain-based framework designed to issue, manage, and transfer security tokens using a system where compliance needs are enforced onchain.

VBILL, launched in May 2025, is a $61 million fund as of Thursday, across approximately 30 onchain wallet addresses. The fund is returning a 3.38% seven-day APY and charges a 0.20% management fee, according to RWA.xyz.

Securitize previously launched VBILL on an Aave Horizon market. The fund was initially launched across the Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Solana blockchains, with cross-chain interoperability enabled by Wormhole.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. [The Block]

5 Bitcoin Miner Stocks Crushing BTC as AI Infrastructure Spending Explodes

Bitcoin miners outperformed BTC by a wide margin in 2026, with a tracked basket of crypto equities up 56% year-to-date while the pioneer crypto fell 17%. Last week, five mining and AI-infrastructure stocks led the gains as Bitcoin slid on rising Treasury yields and hawkish Federal Reserve expectations. The catalysts ran from hyperscaler GPU deals to mega campus acquisitions, all signaling that the miner-to-AI-infrastructure pivot is accelerating.

1. KEEL Infrastructure (KEEL), +30%: KEEL, formerly Bitfarms, posted the strongest weekly gain after Chardan initiated coverage with a Buy rating. The company is repositioning its 2.2-gigawatt power pipeline across Pennsylvania, Washington, and Quebec toward AI and high-performance computing workloads, joining a broader Bitcoin miner AI pivot that has reshaped sector valuations through 2026.

2. Cipher Mining (CIFR), +29%: Cipher rode the same wave on the back of fresh institutional backing and continued progress on its hyperscale leasing pipeline. Analysts pointed to the company’s Texas power footprint and balance-sheet capacity as the key drivers behind investor appetite for more AI data center capacity announcements.

3. IREN (IREN), +29%: IREN signed a $1.6 billion purchase agreement with Dell on May 26 for Blackwell GPU systems that will service its five-year, $3.4 billion managed AI cloud contract. Commissioning is targeted for early 2027 at the company’s Childress, Texas campus, and is expected to lift IREN’s annualized run-rate revenue from $3.7 billion to $4.4 billion.

4. TeraWulf (WULF), +24%: TeraWulf added a 285-acre Muskie Data Campus in Eastern Kentucky on May 26 that the company expects to support up to 1 gigawatt of capacity, with initial 500 MW delivery slated for late 2028. The acquisition extends TeraWulf’s AI and HPC expansion beyond its existing Lake Mariner and Abernathy sites.

5. Hut 8 (HUT), +22%: Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The 352-megawatt facility was designed to NVIDIA’s DSX reference architecture and lifts the company’s contracted AI capacity to about 597 megawatts, building on Hut 8’s expansion plans across Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois.

Why Bitcoin Lagged the Miners: Bitcoin traded around $73,367 on Thursday, down nearly 5% on the week, BeInCrypto data showed. BlackRock’s IBIT extended a multi-day net outflow streak, mirroring the BlackRock AI infrastructure deal thesis that capital is rotating from passive BTC exposure toward miners with hyperscaler contracts. The 10-year Treasury yield eased to 4.47% to 4.50% ahead of the PCE inflation print, and the next FOMC meeting on June 16-17 will likely shape whether the mining stocks rally case holds into the summer.

[10x Research]

US SEC Chairman: Trump administration will provide regulatory clarity for the digital asset market

On May 28th, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins posted that regulators have long been at odds with new technologies and innovations, leading crypto entrepreneurs to go overseas, but this phase is “over.”

He said that under the Trump administration, the SEC will work with the government and Congress to provide the digital asset market with “much-needed regulatory clarity” and advance relevant legislative proposals (including the digital asset “Clarity Act”) to clarify compliance paths and regulatory boundaries.

[PANews]

Walrus: Direct read functionality via the aggregator is operating normally, as the Sui mainnet is experiencing network congestion and cannot process write operations.

The SuiNetwork mainnet is currently experiencing network congestion; the Sui core team is working on repairs, and on-chain transactions may have been suspended.

WalrusProtocol, a data protocol built on Sui, stated that its Walrus Mainnet is currently unable to process write operations due to the SuiNetwork outage, but direct read functionality via aggregators remains operational.

[PANews]

Morpho Releases Midnight Whitepaper, Launches Fixed-Rate Term Credit Non-Custodial Protocol

Morpho announced on X the release of the Morpho Midnight whitepaper, unveiling a new non-custodial protocol designed specifically for fixed-rate, fixed-term credit markets.

Meanwhile, the complete Midnight codebase has been open-sourced, and developers can access it directly via GitHub.

[Odaily]

Bybit will adjust the calculation method for open contracts on June 11.

Bybit has announced that, effective June 11, the calculation method for Open Interest (OI) will change from bilateral counting to single-sided counting, and API users are reminded to update their API fields promptly.

This move aims to enhance market transparency. The new calculation method aligns more closely with other crypto derivatives platforms, further facilitating cross-platform data comparison for users and analysts. After adopting the new method, the displayed Open Interest values will decrease, but actual market activity remains unchanged.

This change reflects only a shift in the calculation methodology; each user’s actual positions, margin, profit/loss, and position limits remain unaffected. Additionally, the system will automatically adjust fees to maintain existing position limit levels.

Starting June 11, updated Open Interest data will be displayed on Bybit’s market data page, trading page, and mobile app. API users must complete their system updates before the effective date. Example: For the BTCUSDT contract, if there are simultaneously 1,000 BTC long positions and 1,000 BTC short positions, the displayed Open Interest will be adjusted from 2,000 BTC to 1,000 BTC.

[Foresight News]

Anthropic launches CLAUDE OPUS 4.8

AI unicorn Anthropic has announced the launch of CLAUDE OPUS 4.8.

Additionally, European Commission officials are planning to meet with Anthropic to obtain more information about the company’s Mythos model and have requested access to it for the EU. Since Anthropic revealed that the model is highly adept at identifying network vulnerabilities and could pose a significant cybersecurity risk, the EU has been pushing for access to Mythos.

According to insiders, any final decision by the EU to gain access to Mythos may require approval from the U.S. government.

[Odaily]

Kalshi’s turn: Prediction markets platform sues Minnesota over law going into effect in August

Kalshi has sued the state of Minnesota after Governor Tim Walz signed a law that bars prediction markets like Kalshi from operating in the state.

On Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of the District of Minnesota, Kalshi sued Attorney General Keith Ellison, Walz and other government officials, accusing them of violating the Supremacy Clause, which gives federal law the upper hand in disputes with states.

Earlier this month, Walz signed a law prohibiting prediction market activities across the state, with an effective date of Aug. 1. Less than 24 hours later, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice sued the state and Walz.

Prediction markets have surged in popularity over the past year with firms like Polymarket and Kalshi being valued at billions of dollars. The platforms allow people to bet on the outcomes of real-world events, such as elections, sports, and controversial issues related to war.

The CFTC, under Chair Michael Selig has said pointedly that prediction markets fall under the “exclusive jurisdiction” of the agency. Over the past few months, the agency sued five states, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, and New York over their attempts to restrict prediction market platforms. Meanwhile, states have argued that prediction market platforms are violating local gaming and gambling laws, particularly those related to sports betting.

In Wednesday’s complaint, Kalshi argued that the new law brands the predictions market “as a felon in the eyes of Minnesota.”

“Shutting down Kalshi’s ability to offer event contracts in Minnesota would irreparably impair Kalshi’s viability as a 50-state derivatives exchange, and require it to implement complex and costly technological solutions to limit access to Kalshi’s offerings in Minnesota—costs that would not be recoverable when Kalshi ultimately prevails in the Action,” according to the complaint.

Kalshi made similar arguments to the CFTC and said that the federal agency has jurisdiction over prediction markets, not states. Ultimately, Kalshi is asking the court for a temporary restraining order and an injunction to block Minnesota state officials from enforcing the new law.

Gov. Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

[The Block]

Coinbase Adds O to Listing Roadmap

Coinbase announced that it will add o1[.]exchange (O) to its listing roadmap.

[Odaily]

U.S. SEC Chair: The adversarial phase between regulation and crypto has ended; the Trump administration will provide regulatory clarity for the digital asset market

Former U.S. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins posted that regulators have long been at odds with new technologies and innovations, leading crypto entrepreneurs to go overseas, but this phase is “over.”

He said that under the Trump administration, the SEC will work with the government and Congress to provide “much-needed regulatory clarity” for the digital asset market and advance relevant legislative proposals (including the digital asset “Clarity Act”) to clarify compliance paths and regulatory boundaries.

[Foresight News]

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent warned Oman not to participate in the Strait of Hormuz toll mechanism

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Oman on Thursday against participating in Iran’s threatened toll mechanism in the Strait of Hormuz.

“The U.S. government will not tolerate any attempt to forcibly impose a toll mechanism in the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, in particular, should understand that the U.S. Treasury Department will severely sanction any entity or individual that assists in the Strait’s tolling, whether directly or indirectly; any partner willing to be an accomplice will be punished,” Bessent wrote.

In addition, the Treasury Secretary called on all countries to resist Iran’s efforts to disrupt passage through this critical shipping lane. He concluded, “The days of Tehran intimidating the region and the world are over.”

[Golden Ten Data]

OpenAI and SpaceX Queue for IPO: Wall Street Starts to “Clear Space” in Advance

As mega IPOs like SpaceX and OpenAI approach, large U.S. mutual funds and passive index funds have begun to adjust their positions in advance. Some funds are increasing their cash holdings and considering reducing their existing large tech stocks in order to free up allocation space for future new constituents.

John Flood, Managing Director of FICC and Equity Business at Goldman Sachs Global Banking and Markets, pointed out that historical data shows that equity mutual funds have increased their cash reserves prior to the arrival of the four largest IPOs in the U.S. market over the past few decades. He said the market is reassessing the impact of large IPOs on the index system and capital flows.

Currently, index compilers such as the Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX), the S&P 500 Index (SPX), and FTSE Russell are rapidly advancing new rules to accelerate the inclusion of ultra-large-cap new stocks into the index. This means that new listed companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, with valuations reaching the trillion-dollar level, may enter major benchmark indexes in a very short period of time after listing.

In addition to SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are also advancing IPO plans. OpenAI’s valuation may reach over $1.00 trillion, and Anthropic’s latest financing valuation is also close to this level.

[Odaily]

Sequans ends Bitcoin treasury bet for IoT chips

Chipmaker Sequans has ended its Bitcoin treasury strategy, selling most of its holdings to clear debt. The French company concluded the strategy after less than a year, selling part of its holdings to redeem convertible debt and refocus on its core chip business.

Sequans disclosed on May 28 that it fully redeemed all remaining July 2025 convertible debt, leaving roughly 658 unrestricted BTC it plans to monetise over time. The company stated that this move results in a stronger balance sheet, a simplified capital structure, and a renewed focus on scaling its IoT semiconductor business.

Sequans launched the strategy in July 2025, raising about $384 million through equity and convertible debt to buy Bitcoin. Its stack peaked above 3,200 BTC at an average cost near $116,000 per coin. The position soured as Bitcoin fell from highs above $126,000 and the firm’s chip revenue declined. Selling intensified, and the latest sale of 456 BTC brought total disposals past 80% of peak holdings.

“We have strengthened our balance sheet, simplified our capital structure, and are now fully focused on scaling our IoT semiconductor business,” CEO Georges Karam said.

Sequans is not alone in this retreat. The firm had already sold half its Bitcoin in May as debt pressure mounted, and smaller treasury firms have also faced forced sales in a weak market. The backdrop remains unforgiving, with Bitcoin trading near $75,000 this week, well below the levels where Sequans built its stack, leaving leveraged holders exposed.

Sequans now plans to prioritise its 4G LTE-M and Cat-1bis chipsets and advance its 5G eRedCap platform as it pushes toward profitability.

Claude Opus 4.8 Rolls Out: Anthropic Strikes Back in AI Race

Anthropic has activated Claude Opus 4.8 for users on May 28, 2026, just weeks after Opus 4.7’s April launch. Fresh code leaks, desktop app sightings, and backend references confirm the rollout, delivering stronger agentic coding and reasoning amid intensifying competition from OpenAI.

Anthropic officially released Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28, 2026, delivering measurable improvements over Opus 4.7. The new model is now available at the same price with powerful new features for coding, agentic workflows, and user control.

Opus 4.8 shows stronger performance across coding, agentic skills, reasoning, and practical knowledge work benchmarks. Early testers highlight greater reliability, sharper judgment, and significantly improved honesty. The model is four times less likely than Opus 4.7 to miss flaws in code it produces and is less prone to unsupported claims. Alignment assessments also reached new highs in prosocial traits while showing substantially lower rates of misaligned behavior compared to Opus 4.7.

Standard pricing remains unchanged: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Fast Mode for Opus 4.8, running at 2.5× speed, is priced at $10/$50 and is three times cheaper than previous fast modes. The model is available immediately across claude.ai, Claude API (claude-opus-4-8), and major cloud platforms.

Anthropic plans lower-cost models with similar capabilities and is preparing Mythos-class models for wider release in the coming weeks after completing stronger cyber safeguards under Project Glasswing. Enterprises and developers can begin testing Opus 4.8 today on complex agentic and coding workloads.

Vayu’s Erez Agmon flags crypto billing as the top revenue leak

Vayu CEO Erez Agmon says broken crypto billing is the biggest hidden source of revenue leakage at scaling infrastructure firms. Vayu chief executive Erez Agmon argues that the contract-to-cash layer, not the product, is what breaks first as crypto firms chase institutional clients. He says homegrown billing setups collapse once pricing turns complex.

The pressure is rising as European rules tighten. Under MiCA, crypto-asset service providers must hold full authorisation to operate in the EU by July 2026, with regulators demanding chronological records and audit trails, ESMA has confirmed. Agmon frames billing accuracy as part of that same operational standard.

Early crypto firms lean on engineering for billing, Agmon says: developers build usage hooks, finance exports the data, and someone turns it into invoices by hand. That works while pricing stays simple. It stops working once terms diversify. Transaction charges, custody tiers, API usage, and wallet operations multiply, and the manual process becomes untenable.

Agmon says the fix is moving billing from an engineering task to a finance-owned workflow. He points to wallet platform Utila, which reported more than $51 million in total funding and over 100 institutional clients. The firm sits inside a wider stablecoin infrastructure buildout and processes over $15 billion in monthly transactions, a volume that exposes any gap between what was sold and what gets invoiced. Utila previously depended heavily on engineering to launch products and adjust pricing, which created bottlenecks.

Inbal Rosen, Utila’s head of business operations, said the partnership changed that. “By providing us with deep insights and real-time data on our revenue streams, Vayu enhances our strategic decision-making capabilities.”

Asked for the most underestimated leak, Agmon names unbilled or underbilled usage. Crypto infrastructure firms price around events, he says: transactions, API calls, verification events, and volume thresholds. When those events are not wired to billing rules automatically, revenue gets missed or delayed. The problem is sharpest with overages, where a customer may already hold an invoice that does not match actual usage, leading to disputes or write-offs.

Agmon ties the gap to a broader compliance shift, where auditability now hits cash flow directly. Traceability is the gap most firms still leave open, connecting the signed contract, the pricing terms, the actual usage, and the invoice. The emerging fix, he says, is a hybrid model: a committed base fee plus metered usage, a tiered rate card, and finance owning the billing logic directly. That discipline matters more as the MiCA deadline forces firms to prove what they sold, used, billed, and recognised.

Vayu, founded in 2023 and backed by $7 million in seed funding, counts clients including Au10tix and Mesh Payments alongside Utila. Agmon says the layer between what was sold and what gets invoiced is where crypto firms must modernise next, especially as licensing and institutional diligence intensify.

Today, the US Bitcoin ETF had a net outflow of 9,012 BTC, and the Ethereum ETF had a net outflow of 40,247 ETH.

According to Lookonchain monitoring, today the U.S. Bitcoin ETF saw a net outflow of 9,012 BTC, while the Ethereum ETF experienced a net outflow of 40,247 ETH.

Additionally, the Solana ETF recorded a net inflow of 2,401 SOL.

[Odaily Planet Daily]

Goldman Sachs: U.S. stocks may see a new “short squeeze”-style rally

Since the end of April, bearish bets on US and Canadian stocks have rapidly increased. Data from S3 Partners LLC shows that total short positions have increased by nearly $100.00 billion to $2.13 trillion, the highest record since the agency began statistics in 2010. Meanwhile, statistics from Goldman Sachs’ prime brokerage business show that the median net short position of S&P 500 index components as a percentage of market capitalization has risen to 3.00%, the highest level since the end of 2011.

Goldman Sachs’ trading department regards this position structure as a key signal of change, believing that the next stage of market gains may come from a “short squeeze” formed by short covering, rather than continuing to rely on the expansion of gains led by large technology stocks in the previous two months.

The team consisting of Gail Hafif, Brian Garrett, and Lee Coppersmith pointed out: “We do see the potential for the market to rise further from current levels, but the next stage of the rise is more likely to be driven by short covering in those unpopular market sectors, as well as risk aversion to momentum mania.”

[Odaily]

Insider: The U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding has not been approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader.

According to Amichai Stein, a reporter for Israel’s i24News, citing a source familiar with the matter, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not yet approved the memorandum of understanding—this may also be one of the reasons why Trump has not given his nod of approval.

In reality, what currently exists may only be a certain level of consensus reached among Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi, Parliament Speaker Qalibaf, U.S. Special Envoy for the Middle East Wittkoff and his team—but Iran’s true top leadership and ultimate decision-makers have yet to say “yes.”

[Odaily]

Coinbase adds o1.exchange (O) to its listing roadmap

Coinbase has added o1.exchange (O) to its listing roadmap.

[Foresight News]

Standard Chartered says battered Ethereum looks like Amazon in 2001

Standard Chartered is telling clients to treat Ethereum’s latest price slump the way Jeff Bezos told Amazon shareholders to treat the dot‑com crash, arguing that the token’s “stock is not the company” and that fundamentals will force price to catch up over the next cycle. Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, told clients he views Ethereum (ETH) “very much as Jeff Bezos described Amazon’s share price during the 2001 tech bubble burst,” insisting that the recent drawdown “does not reflect continuing improvements in Ethereum’s network fundamentals.”

In a note summarized by journalist Yogita and outlets like The Block, Kendrick leans on Bezos’s line that “the stock is not the company,” pointing to how Amazon fell to around $6 in the early 2000s before compounding into a trillion‑dollar behemoth. The pitch is simple: Ethereum’s price, which has slumped sharply from its recent highs and at times slipped below $2,000 in 2026, is “lagging behind its improving fundamentals and will eventually catch up,” as one recap on The Daily Block put it.

Kendrick and his team kept their headline targets unchanged at $4,000 by end‑2026 and $40,000 by 2030, figures that imply a roughly 2x move over the next 18 months and up to a 20x rally into the end of the decade from price levels around $2,000–$3,000 when the note was drafted. In the client note, Kendrick explicitly channels Bezos’s famous quip to argue that the market is mispricing what Ethereum has become. He wrote that like early‑2000s Amazon, Ethereum today is “quietly becoming the backbone” of a new financial stack, with on‑chain stablecoins, tokenized assets and DeFi activity all near record levels even as price chops lower.

The note zeroes in on a handful of metrics: near‑record daily transaction counts, Ethereum’s still‑dominant share of stablecoin settlement and its lead in tokenized real‑world assets. An internal forecast from Standard Chartered’s digital assets team has stablecoin supply growing toward $2 trillion this cycle, much of it expected to sit or settle on Ethereum, with Kendrick arguing that “more activity should mean higher token price” over time as base‑layer demand, fee markets and staking dynamics feed back into valuation. https://t.co/5EOn4y2pdx

That logic dovetails with earlier research from the bank, covered in a January update and unpacked in a crypto.news analysis, where Kendrick trimmed some medium‑term ETH dollar targets but said Ethereum’s “prospects have improved” relative to bitcoin and expected the ETH/BTC cross to “gradually return to its 2021 highs” as throughput, DeFi, stablecoins and regulation matured. In a separate public appearance, cited in a LinkedIn transcript, Kendrick laid out his long‑term map even more bluntly: “My long‑term forecast is $500,000 BTC by 2030 and $40,000 Ethereum by 2030… roughly 20x [for Ethereum], but a huge outperformance [versus Bitcoin] as well.”

Not everyone buys the analogy or the targets. The same note and its viral derivatives, from The Block to social posts by accounts like Ethprofit, acknowledge that Standard Chartered’s past crypto calls have not always stuck the landing, with earlier cycle forecasts for bitcoin and ether repeatedly revised as the macro picture shifted. Kendrick’s bullishness depends heavily on the U.S. and key jurisdictions delivering something close to regulatory clarity rather than outright hostility.

He specifically flags the combination of stablecoin regulation, tokenization frameworks and potential changes in securities law as catalysts that could unlock institutional flows into Ethereum, a thesis echoed in previous crypto.news coverage of how policy shifts could re‑rate the asset if it becomes the default substrate for regulated DeFi and real‑world asset rails. For now, Ethereum’s actual price and market cap tell a more modest story. At current levels around the low‑to‑mid‑$2,000s, with a market capitalization well below its 2021 peak and still far from the $4,000 near‑term and $40,000 long‑term targets Kendrick has pinned on it, the asset looks less like a foregone Amazon rerun and more like a high‑beta macro instrument still at the mercy of ETF flows, rates expectations and bitcoin’s gravitational pull.

But the fact that a global bank is invoking Bezos and the dot‑com crash to defend Ethereum after a painful drawdown says something about how far the narrative has shifted since the last cycle. As Kendrick put it in language that both crypto faithful and equity quants can understand, the bet is that “ETH will catch up to internal metrics”—and that in 2030, today’s price action looks like Amazon at $6 rather than Pets.com on the way to zero.