Crypto Vesting

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties.

Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter.

“He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said.

The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients.

The breaches occurred from

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Big Four accounting firm EY, formerly Ernst & Young, has changed its enterprise-focused Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Nightfall to a zero-knowledge rollup design as it says corporate clients are more comfortable with privacy solutions with easing US sanctions.

EY said in an April 2 announcement that Nightfall’s new source code, “Nightfall_4,” simplifies the network’s architecture and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum while making it more accessible to users than its previous optimistic rollup-based version.

EY’s global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, told Cointelegraph that switching to a ZK-rollup model “means instant finality, but it also makes operations simpler since you don’t need a challenger node to secure the network,” which verifies the correctness of transactions.

The move away from optimistic rollups means Nightfall users won’t need to challenge potentially incorrect transactions on Ethereum and wait out the challenging period, leading to faster transaction finality.

No

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United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing reciprocal tariffs on trading partners and a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from all countries.

The reciprocal levies on will be approximately half of what trading partners charge for US imports, Trump said. For example, China currently has a tariff of 67% on US imports, so US reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods will be 34%. Trump also announced a standard 25% tariff on all automobile imports.

Trump told the media that tariffs would return the country to economic prosperity seen in previous centuries:

“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. The United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting.”

“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the

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Two Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate and House of Representatives have called on acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Mark Uyeda to preserve information regarding World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm backed by President Donald Trump’s family.

In an April 2 letter, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Maxine Waters — ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee, respectively — asked Uyeda to provide information to Congress based on Trump’s ties to World Liberty Financial (WLFI). The two lawmakers suggested the SEC may be being influenced by the firm, and “this conflict of interest may be interfering with its mission to protect investors and maintain fair and orderly markets.”

“The Trump family’s financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest with the potential to influence the Trump Administration’s oversight — or lack thereof — of the cryptocurrency

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Curve Finance, a decentralized lending protocol and exchange, notched record-breaking trading volumes of nearly $35 billion in the first quarter of 2025, a spokesperson for the protocol told Cointelegraph. 

Trading volumes increased more than 13% from the first quarter of 2024, largely due to a surge in transactions, from around 1.8 million to some 5.5 million in Q1 2025, Curve said. 

The strong Q1 volumes come amid overall declines in the cryptocurrency market, with the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies dropping by more than 20% in the year-to-date as of March 31, according to data from CoinGecko.

Curve’s total value locked (TVL) over time. Source: DefiLlama

Related: Curve Finance launches ‘Savings crvUSD’ yield-bearing stablecoin

Changing DeFi Landscape

Launched in 2020, Curve has taken numerous steps in the past year to keep pace with the changing decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape.

In June

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Ether (ETH) price has risen 6.4% from its March 30 $1,768 low but the altcoin has struggled to regain the $2,000 level. Some traders believe that the downturn is partially connected to the deflating memecoin market, which, while not exclusive to the Ethereum network, significantly reduced activity across the decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem and broader crypto space.

Ether is currently 44% down year-to-date, and derivatives metrics indicate that traders are far from bullish and show little confidence in a strong recovery in the near term. Proof of this can be found in the premium on Ether futures relative to spot markets. 

While the figure rose to 4% on April 2, up from 2% on March 31, it is still below the neutral 5% threshold. This data indicates that Ether investors remain far from turning bullish, despite the strengthening support at the $1,800 price level.

Ether 2-month futures annualized

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Bitcoin price caught an unexpected bid by rallying to a session high at $88,500, but will the price gains be capped at a multimonth overhead resistance that is aligned with the 50-day moving average? 

Key points:

Bitcoin extended its April. 1 gains as news that the Trump administration had not finalized its “Liberation Day” tariffs emerged. 

Israel, Mexico and India have already rolled back their tariffs on US imports or suggested that they will not do “tit for tat” tariffs in response to the expected April 2 US tariffs. 

Bitcoin (BTC) trades slightly below a 3-month descending trendline resistance where the price has consistentlybeen rejected during past rallies. 

Total market liquidations over the past 12-hour trading period have reached $145 million, with $69.4 million of the figure being Bitcoin shorts.  

Data from Kingfisher, CoinGlass and Velo show short liquidations playing a role in today’s push above

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West Virginia’s Bitcoin (BTC) strategic reserve bill would give the state more sovereignty from the federal government and freedom from a potential central bank digital currency (CBDC), State Senator Chris Rose told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview.

“You hear these rumors that there are people at the federal government that will want to have a central bank digital currency,” Rose said. “And people don’t want that. People want decentralized currency. They want freedom.”

The bill, introduced in February, seeks to allow the state treasury to invest up to 10% of public funds in precious metals like gold and silver, stablecoins, or any digital asset that has had a $750 million market capitalization or higher over the last 12 months. Currently, the only digital asset with such a market cap is Bitcoin.

West Virginia State Senator Chris Rose. Source:

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The DoubleZero Protocol, a blockchain infrastructure network aiming to multiply speeds and efficiency for distributed networks, announced a validator funding round to sell token-purchase agreements for its native token to prospective validators.

Applications for the funding round will be accepted April 2-10 through the CoinList platform, marking its first public token sale in the United States since 2019. The round is only available to accredited investors.

According to the protocol, only validators currently serving the high-throughput Solana, Celestia, Sui, Aptos, and Avalanche networks are eligible to apply.

Interested parties are invited to submit bids declaring a per-unit token price and maximum budgets, which will be aggregated to determine the final sale price offered to the participating validators.

A diagram of the DoubleZero validator funding round process. Source: CoinList

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Austin Federa, co-founder of the Double Zero protocol and former Strategy

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