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Ex-Binance CEO chides Europe over crypto adoption

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, said most European countries were moving “nowhere” in terms of the adoption of digital currencies.

Speaking at the Token2049 conference in Dubai on April 30, Zhao said that areas of the United Arab Emirates were “extremely pro-business,” leading to crypto adoption in Dubai, while others like Bhutan were building national Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) stockpiles. According to Zhao, the US was pressing other countries’ hands by exploring its own policies for a crypto reserve, but those in Europe didn’t seem to be reacting.

“I don’t see Europe in this discussion,” said Zhao, highlighting one exception. “Montenegro is actually quite pro-crypto. We had an active dialogue with [the] prime minister there, and he’s a very forward-thinking person, leader. But other than Montenegro, I don’t have any other,

Grayscale launches Bitcoin adopters exchange-traded fund

Asset manager Grayscale launched the Grayscale Bitcoin Adopters exchange-traded fund (ETF), an investment vehicle that tracks companies employing a Bitcoin (BTC) treasury, or holding strategy.

According to the April 30 announcement, the ETF will provide exposure to companies across seven business sectors, including Bitcoin mining firms, automotive companies, and energy.

Some of the most notable firms in the ETF include Michael Saylor’s Strategy, mining company MARA, automotive manufacturer Tesla, BTC treasury company Metaplanet, and aerospace energy firm KULR Technology Group.

Grayscale’s Bitcoin Adopters ETF highlights the growing trend of Bitcoin acquisition companies using the scarce digital asset to drive up shareholder prices and to protect their corporate financial reserves against the inflation inherent in fiat currencies.

Public companies with Bitcoin holdings. Source: River

Bitcoin drops under $93K after US GDP data shows shrinking economy, raising recession alarms

Key points:

US GDP shrank in Q1, raising recession alarms while also prompting calls for Fed rate cuts.

Bitcoin dropped to $92,910 as GDP figures were released, but sustained buy-side demand could provide support.

Today’s crypto derisking is likely transitory; market fundamentals remain strong.

Bitcoin (BTC) price took an abrupt tumble as data showed the US gross domestic product (GDP) retracting by 0.3% in Q1, raising alarms among analysts anticipating a recession. Following the news, BTC price dropped to an intra-day low of $92,910, while the DOW and S&P 500 fell by 1% and 1.3% respectively.

While the GDP figures are shocking at face value, CNBC pointed out that the drop was primarily due to “a surge in imports ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.” Imports are subtracted from GDP, suggesting that the pullback is more transitory than endemic.

After an initial 1% price drop, Bitcoin

EU digital product passports won’t solve food fraud, but blockchain can

Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd

Brutal honesty has its place, especially when confronting discomfort, so here’s one that can’t be sweetened with honey: 96% of imported honey in the UK is fake! Tests found that 24 of 25 jars were suspicious or didn’t meet regulatory standards.

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) can fix this.

The UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission both urge reform to tackle this concern by creating a robust traceability database within supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. Data, however, is not the problem. The issue is people tampering with it.

This is not the first time products have been revealed to be inauthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network highlighting that one-third of all honey products were fake in 2020, a fraudulent industry amounting to

Bitcoin price recovers, Ethereum RWA value up 20%: April in charts

April 2025 witnessed crypto markets rocked by more tariffs at the direction of US President Donald Trump — controversial policies that could have influenced the outcome of Canada’s elections on April 28.

On April 2, Trump levied “discounted reciprocal tariffs” on 185 countries and territories. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,200 points on April 4, while the S&P 500 dropped nearly 6%, its largest decline since March 2020. Bitcoin (BTC) went along for the ride but broke from stocks as it recovered toward the end of the month.

Blockchain adoption metrics for Ethereum are looking good, as the network now boasts 60% real-world asset (RWA) tokenization value. Major firms like BlackRock are sure the blockchain will be the standard for RWAs, but other observers believe that scaling issues could create problems.

On matters of policy, pro-crypto legislators in a number of US states are pushing

China’s DeepSeek launches new open-source AI after R1 took on OpenAI

Chinese artificial intelligence development company DeepSeek has released a new open-weight large language model (LLM).

DeepSeek uploaded its newest model, Prover V2, to the hosting service Hugging Face on April 30. The latest model, released under the permissive open-source MIT license, aims to tackle math proof verification.

DeepSeek-Prover-V2 HuggingFace repository. Source: HuggingFace

Prover V2 has 671 billion parameters, making it significantly larger than its predecessors, Prover V1 and Prover V1.5, which were released in August 2024. The paper accompanying the first version explained that the model was trained to translate math competition problems into formal logic using the Lean 4 programming language — a tool widely used for proving theorems.

The developers say Prover V2 compresses mathematical knowledge into a format that allows it to generate and verify

Vitalik outlines vision as Ethereum ecosystem addresses hit new high

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released another update on what he believes the future of the network should entail.

In an April 30 post on blockchain-based social media platform Farcaster, Buterin outlined his personal areas of focus for Ethereum development this year. These include investigating changes to the network infrastructure to achieve single-slot finality, updates to smart contract execution and enhancements to privacy.

The post comes as the Ethereum network hits a new milestone. GrowThePie data shows that the weekly number of unique addresses interacting with the Ethereum ecosystem reached a new high of over 15.4 million, with nearly 13.45 million on layer-2 protocols.

Weekly chart of unique active addresses in the Ethereum ecosystem. Source: GrowThePie

Buterin recently argued that privacy should be a top priority for developers and proposed solutions to boost

$330M Bitcoin social engineering theft victim is elderly US citizen

An elderly US individual is reportedly the victim of a devastating $330 million Bitcoin heist, now ranked as the fifth-largest crypto hack in history.

The attacker used advanced social engineering tactics to gain access to the victim’s wallet, onchain investigator ZachXBT said in an April 30 update on X.

The hack took place on April 28, 2025, when ZachXBT flagged a suspicious transfer involving 3,520 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at $330.7 million.

Following the transfer, the stolen stash was quickly laundered through over six instant exchanges and swapped into privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR).

Onchain data shows that the victim had held over 3,000 BTC since 2017, with no prior history of large-scale transactions.

ZachXBT confirming the victim of the hack. Source: ZachXBT

Once stolen, the attacker wasted no time laundering the Bitcoin using a peel chain method — a common obfuscation technique

The open source debate: Is crypto losing its soul?

Crypto was born from an open-source ethos, where code was shared publicly, accessible for review and shaped by community contributions. Transparency and verifiability are foundational principles that enable trust in Bitcoin.

But as the space matured, some disadvantages of open source surfaced. Innovative smart contract platforms and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications were forked to create direct competitors — from the wave of Uniswap clones to Ethereum forks — which prioritized speed and lower fees over decentralization.

As a result, some projects opted for closed-source development to protect proprietary designs and reduce the risk of exploits, hoping to delay or deter malicious actors by making the code harder to analyze. This approach is often criticized as “security through obscurity,” where hiding vulnerabilities instead of fixing them becomes a line of defense.

Closed-source systems run counter to crypto’s original vision

Crypto hackers hit DeFi for $92M in April as attacks double from March

Cryptocurrency hackers stole more than $90 million in April, dealing another blow to the industry’s mainstream reputation despite ongoing efforts to improve cybersecurity.

Hackers made off with $92 million of digital assets across 15 incidents in April, according to an April 30 research report by blockchain cybersecurity firm Immunefi.

The total marks a 124% month-over-month increase from March, when hackers stole $41 million.

Crypto stole in April 2025. Source: Immunefi

The month’s largest hack on open-source platform UPCX accounted for most of the damage in April, with over $70 million in losses, while KiloEx lost $7.5 million as April’s second-largest hack.

The KiloEx exploiter returned the stolen funds just days after the attack occurred.

All of April’s reported attacks targeted decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. Centralized exchanges reported no incidents during the month, the report noted.

Top 10 losses in April. Source: