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BTC price to $116K next? Bitcoin trader sees 'early week' all-time high

Key points:

Bitcoin is convincing traders that an upside breakout is around the corner, with all-time highs in sight.

One target demands $116,000 next week, moving BTC/USD firmly out of its narrow range.

A quick dip before continuing higher is among the options for BTC price action into the new week.

Bitcoin (BTC) reduced volatility to a minimum into the May 18 weekly close as traders bet on a fresh breakout.

BTC/USD 4-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingViewBTC price brews classic breakout signal

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed the area around $103,000 acting as a BTC price magnet throughout the weekend.

Now barely fluctuating up or down, BTC/USD was primed for a liquidity grab, with $105,000 and $103,000 both targets, data from monitoring resource CoinGlass confirmed.

BTC liquidation heatmap. Source: CoinGlass

Commenting on the current market structure, traders

‘Bitcoin Standard’ author backs funding dev to make spamming Bitcoin costly

Economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, has weighed in on the ongoing debate over spam inscriptions on the Bitcoin network, suggesting he would “throw in a few sats” to fund a full-time developer focused on making Bitcoin spamming more difficult and expensive.

Ammous made the remarks in response to a thread initiated by the pseudonymous developer GrassFedBitcoin, who called for Bitcoin Core to merge pull request #28408, which would enable node operators to filter inscriptions more easily.

According to GrassFedBitcoin, the lack of inscription filtering tools contributes to unnecessary blockchain bloat and undermines Bitcoin (BTC)’s role as a monetary protocol.

“No one running a node wants to relay inscriptions,” he wrote, arguing that the OP_RETURN limit increases were justified in the past under false assumptions. He pushed for a configurable, default policy discouraging the use of Bitcoin for storing JPEGs rather

Retired artist loses $2M in crypto to Coinbase impersonator

Retired artist Ed Suman lost over $2 million in cryptocurrency earlier this year after falling victim to a scam involving someone posing as a Coinbase support representative.

Suman, 67, spent nearly two decades as a fabricator in the art world, helping build high-profile works such as Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog sculptures, according to a May 17 report by Bloomberg.

After retiring, he turned to cryptocurrency investing, eventually accumulating 17.5 Bitcoin (BTC) and 225 Ether (ETH) — a portfolio that comprised most of his retirement savings.

He stored the funds in a Trezor Model One, a hardware wallet commonly used by crypto holders to avoid the risks of exchange hacks. But in March, Suman received a text message appearing to be from Coinbase, warning him of unauthorized account access.

After responding, he got a phone call from a man identifying

UK to require crypto firms to report every customer transaction

United Kingdom crypto companies will need to collect and report data from every customer trade and transfer beginning Jan. 1, 2026 as part of a broader effort to improve crypto tax reporting, the UK government said.

Everything from the user’s full name, home address and tax identification number will need to be collected and reported for every transaction, including the cryptocurrency used and the amount moved, the UK Revenue and Customs department said in a May 14 statement.

Details of companies, trusts and charities transacting on crypto platforms will also need to be reported.

Failure to comply or inaccurate reporting may incur penalties of up to 300 British pounds ($398.4) per user. The UK Revenue and Customs department said it would inform companies on how to comply with the incoming measures in due course.

However, UK authorities are encouraging crypto firms to start collecting data now to ensure compliance

Hong Kong police busts $15M laundering ring that used crypto, 500 bank accounts

Hong Kong police arrested 12 people involved in a cross-border money laundering scheme that relied on crypto and over 500 stooge bank accounts to launder HK$118 million ($15 million), local news outlets reported.

The syndicate was dismantled on May 15, resulting in the arrest of nine men and three women in mainland China and Hong Kong.

The suspects allegedly recruited others to open bank accounts to receive proceeds from fraud cases, which were then converted into crypto at crypto exchange shops to launder the illicit funds, Hong Kong Commercial Daily reported on May 17.

The criminal organization rented a residential unit in the Hong Kong neighborhood of Mong Kok to plan and carry out its money laundering activities. Of the $15 million laundered, more than $1.2 million was linked to 58 reported fraud cases.

Caught in action

The bust followed police surveillance on May 15, when two recruits left

The Public internet is a bottleneck for blockchain — DoubleZero CEO

Public internet infrastructure is the critical speed and performance constraint on high-throughput blockchain networks, according to Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero, a project developing high-speed fiber optic communication rails for blockchains.

“The downside of the public internet is it was never built for high-performance systems. It was always built for this sort of relationship of one big server talking to one little server,” Federa told Cointelegraph in an interview at Consensus 2025. The executive explained:

“We have validators all around the world. Rotating leader schedules all the time. And then they switch from having to be massive consumers of data to extremely massive broadcasters of data. So that means that they need huge amounts of resources both on ingress and egress.”

The executive added that the constraint posed by public internet infrastructure is now the limiting factor in blockchain performance and not compute power or software development.

Austin Federa giving a presentation

Moody's downgrades US credit rating due to rising debt

Moody’s credit rating agency downgraded the credit rating of the United States government from Aaa to Aa1, citing the rising national debt as the primary driver behind the reduction in creditworthiness.

According to the May 16 announcement from the rating agency, US lawmakers have failed to stem annual deficits or reduce spending over the years, leading to a growing national debt. The rating agency wrote:

“We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from the current fiscal proposals under consideration. Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat.”

The credit downgrade is only one degree out of the 21-notch rating scale used by the company to assess the credit health of an entity.

An overview of the US national debt. Source: <a data-ct-non-breakable="null" href="https://usdebtclock.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"

High-speed oracles disrupting $50B finance data industry — Web3 Exec

Michael James, the head of institutional business development at Douro Labs — the company that developed the Pyth high-speed blockchain oracle network — told Cointelegraph that oracle networks like Pyth are disrupting the $50 billion financial data industry that provides critical price information to exchanges, brokerages, trading firms, and other institutional entities.

In an interview at Consensus 2025, the executive said that Pyth Network’s data pull model sets it apart from traditional pricing oracles, allowing customers to pay for data on demand, reducing costs for institutions reliant on real-time market data.

Differences between pull and push models in oracle systems. Source: Pyth Network

According to the executive, the financial data industry is currently monopolized by around eight major providers that continually raise prices on clients arbitrarily. James added:

“These data vendors have no competition in traditional finance, and so they have all the

A Bitcoiner’s guide to South Africa’s Garden Route

South Africa’s Garden Route, famed for its lush forests, expansive beaches and charming towns, has become a testbed for Bitcoin adoption.

From Mossel Bay to Witsand and Plettenberg Bay to Knysna, Bitcoin has become popular among shop owners and travelers alike for a multitude of reasons.

“We’re seeing the early signs of a parallel, permissionless economy emerging across an entire region,” James Caw, founder of SimplB — a local crypto asset provider — told Cointelegraph, “where small businesses benefit from faster, lower-cost digital payments and where people have more options to earn, send and receive sound money securely.”

For tourists, the benefits are immediate: no currency exchange hassles, no international card fees, and the ability to pay instantly and securely. For locals, Bitcoin (BTC) offers a hedge against inflation, protection from currency volatility and new economic opportunities.

Here’s a taste of what a Bitcoin-friendly trip along the Garden Route

The DeFi mullet — Fintech needs DeFi in the back

Opinion by: Merlin Egalite, co-founder at Morpho Labs

Fintechs in the front, decentralized finance (DeFi) in the back: the DeFi Mullet.

Today’s fintech companies offer excellent user experiences but are constrained by traditional financial infrastructure — siloed, slow, expensive and inflexible. Meanwhile, DeFi provides lightning-fast, cost-effective, interoperable infrastructure but lacks mainstream accessibility.

The solution? Combine fintech’s distribution and user experience with DeFi’s efficient back end.

The mullet is inevitable

Fintech companies heavily rely on traditional financial (TradFi) infrastructure that is siloed, slow to deploy and run, and costly to maintain. This inefficiency limits their control over costs and product offerings and has potential infrastructure risks. Fintechs have a strong incentive to transition to building on autonomous, credibly neutral public infrastructure.

The power of DeFi is evident in stablecoins. While traditional international wire transfers cost $30–$50 and take one to five business days, stablecoin transfers cost mere cents and settle in seconds. This revolutionary improvement in financial