Morning Minute: Ceasefire Hopes Rise, Fall Along with Bitcoin

Q: Why did Bitcoin jump and then drop on Monday?

Bitcoin rose above $70,000 after reports that Pakistan was brokering a 45-day ceasefire framework between the US and Iran. Those gains faded as ceasefire hopes weakened and Trump’s 48-hour deadline got closer, sending BTC back down to about $68,300.

Q: How much Bitcoin did Strategy buy this week?

Strategy bought 4,871 BTC for $330 million, resuming purchases after a one-week pause. The average price was about $67,700 per bitcoin, and most of the funding came from STRC preferred shares.

Q: What is BitMine doing with Ethereum?

BitMine added 71,252 ETH, worth about $152 million, last week. That brought its total holdings to more than 4.8 million ETH, or about 3.98% of the circulating supply, and it is staking 3.14 million ETH for yield.

Q: What is Polymarket changing in its platform?

Polymarket is overhauling its exchange with a new order book and a native stablecoin called Polymarket USD. Users will need to wrap USDC into Polymarket USD to use the new system, and the move could set up future yield features or a potential POLY token.

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by*Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.* *And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes or less, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.*

GM!

Today’s top news:

Crypto majors rise then fall overnight; BTC -2% at $68.4k
Saylor buys another $330M in BTC; STRC powers 70%
Tom Lee’s BMNR bought $150M in ETH as total nears 4% of ETH supply
Polymarket announces full exchange overhaul and new Polymarket USD stable
Circle’s Arc will launch its mainnet with post-quantum signature support

🌎 Ceasefire Hopes Rise, Fall Along with Bitcoin

Bitcoin hit its highest price in over a week Monday morning as reports emerged that Pakistan is brokering a 45-day ceasefire between the US and Iran, what mediators are calling the “Islamabad Accord.”

The move sent a wave of risk-on buying across crypto, equities, and oil markets, with BTC passing $70,000 and the broader crypto market adding roughly $70B in market cap within hours.

But as the day went on, those ceasefire hopes faded as Trump’s 48-hour countdown got closer to its end. Bitcoin fell 3% into the evening, now just at $68,300. Meanwhile Oil jumped 4% to $114 and stock futures are red (-0.5%) ahead of Trump’s deadline ending today.

It appears we are not out of the woods yet.

Key Details:

Bitcoin hit $70k+ Monday after Reuters reported the US, Iran, and regional mediators are discussing a 45-day ceasefire framework put together by Pakistan
$273M in crypto shorts were liquidated in 24 hours, a nearly 3-to-1 short-to-long wipeout
Polymarket odds on a ceasefire by April 30 rose to ~28%; a full de-escalation could push BTC above $90,000 per analysts at Bitget Wallet

₿ Mike and Tom Keep Buying

Strategy snapped a one-week pause in Bitcoin buying Monday, announcing a $330M purchase of 4,871 BTC at an average price of $67,700, well below where BTC was trading at announcement. The buy was funded overwhelmingly by STRC, which contributed $227M versus $72M from common stock. STRC remained hot on Monday, doing enough volume for another ~936 BTC purchases.

Meanwhile Tom Lee’s BitMine added 71,252 ETH ($152M) last week, pushing its total stash to more than 4.8M ETH, valued around $10.3B and representing 3.98% of all circulating Ethereum. The firm is staking 3.14M ETH generating approximately $272M per year in yield. One more week like this and BitMine controls 4% of the entire ETH supply.

Key Details:

Strategy resumed Bitcoin buying with a $330M purchase of 4,871 BTC at $67,700 avg after skipping one week; STRC preferred shares funded $227M of the $330M total
BitMine added 71,252 ETH ($152M) last week, bringing total holdings to 4.8M ETH (~$10.3B), 3.98% of circulating ETH supply; the firm is staking 3.14M ETH generating ~$272M/year in yield
Strategy’s scale: ~767,000 BTC represents roughly 3.65% of Bitcoin’s total supply; STRC yields ~11.5% annualized with a ~$735M/year dividend burden

🎯 Polymarket Is Building Its Own Financial System

Polymarket just announced what it’s calling its “biggest change to date.”

The prediction market is rolling out a new order book, replacing its existing smart contract infrastructure from the ground up. But the real news is its currency exchange: Polymarket USD, the platform’s own native stablecoin backed 1:1 with USDC. Users will need to wrap their USDC into Polymarket USD to participate in the new system.

The move has obvious implications. A platform-native stablecoin means Polymarket controls the float. If that stablecoin pays yield, it becomes a serious competitor to on-chain savings products. And a native stablecoin is the logical precursor to a native token (i.e. the POLY token).

Key Details:

Polymarket announced a full exchange overhaul including a new order book and Polymarket USD, a native stablecoin backed 1:1 with USDC replacing the platform’s existing bridged USDC.e collateral token
The stablecoin angle: if Polymarket USD pays yield, it becomes an onchain savings product; if it doesn’t, it sets up a POLY token with real utility as the next step
Valuation context: Polymarket is seeking a $20B FDV in its next funding round, up from a $9B valuation after a $2B investment from NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange last October

⚛️ Circle’s Arc Is Building Quantum Walls Before Anyone Else Is

Circle’s Arc is shipping major updates to handle the pending quantum threat.

The Layer-1 blockchain backed by USDC issuer Circle announced Monday that its upcoming mainnet will launch with post-quantum signature support built in from day one. The move is a direct response to last week’s Google paper, which put a real probability on quantum computers cracking Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography by 2032.

Arc’s approach is opt-in with no mandatory migration, or network reset, which is in stark contrast to a potential Bitcoin migration to post-quantum wallets, which “could take months of continuous processing in a best-case scenario.”

Key Details:

Circle’s Arc will launch its mainnet with post-quantum signature support covering wallets, validator authentication, private smart contract state, and supporting infrastructure
The technical edge: Arc’s sub-second block finalization leaves a 500ms window for attackers to forge validator signatures; post-quantum signatures are an order of magnitude larger than classical ones
Arc’s testnet participants include BlackRock, Visa, Goldman Sachs, AWS, Coinbase, and Kraken

🤖 OpenAI Wants Governments to Rethink Taxes, Labor, and Safety Before AI Breaks Everything

OpenAI published a sweeping policy paper Monday titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First,” calling on world governments to overhaul tax policy, strengthen worker protections, and build safety oversight infrastructure before AI-driven economic disruption arrives at scale.

The 2 core goals of the 13-page report are to:

make sure AI’s economic gains are broadly shared and not concentrated among a few firms/individuals
build stronger systems to handle risks from increasingly powerful models.

For goal 1, their ideas include policies around worker voice and input into AI usage, public access to AI tools, new tax structures, shorter work weeks, and even a public wealth fund.

For goal 2, they mention stronger safety nets in high-risk domains like cyber and biology, an “AI trust stack” for provenance, verification, and privacy-preserving audit logs, and model-containment playbooks for scenarios where dangerous systems are already out in the world.

In short, OpenAI is saying the AI transition is likely to be faster and more destabilizing than prior industrial revolutions and we need to prepare now. And they want society to have a voice in who benefits, who decides, and who is protected.

Key Details:

- The core argument: “If AI winds up controlled by, and benefiting only a few... we will have failed to deliver on its promise”
- The timing: dropped the same day The New Yorker published Sutskever’s internal memos accusing Altman of being “not consistently candid” about safety — the exact charge behind his 2023 firing
- The crypto thread: OpenAI’s AI-labor-taxation framework connects directly to stablecoin and UBI infrastructure debates; expect this paper to surface in Congressional AI/crypto hearings this year

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors fell yesterday evening as ceasefire hopes fade; BTC -2% at $68.5k; ETH -3% at $2,090; SOL -4% at $79.2; HYPE -2% at $36.40
CC (+6%), DEXE (+5%), and ZEC (+3%) led top movers
Oil +4% at $114; Gold -1% at $4,640
The IMF warned that stablecoins resemble money market funds more than actual money and could face confidence-driven runs as tokenized finance scales
The IMF also said tokenization could revolutionize financial markets by enabling 24/7 settlement and fractional ownership of assets, while warning of new systemic risks from automated smart contract execution and cross-border regulatory gaps
Bitcoin Core developers are spotlighting "attack blocks" on the Signet test network today, specially crafted blocks that take orders of magnitude longer to verify than normal ones, exposing a live consensus vulnerability that BIP 54 (the Great Consensus Cleanup) aims to fix

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

The Bitcoin ETFs saw $471M in net inflows on Monday, its highest total since Feb 25; the ETH ETFs had $120M in net outflows
Strive added to its Bitcoin treasury this week, boosting its stash to ~$940M (13,741 BTC total); the Vivek Ramaswamy-backed firm has now surpassed Tesla in corporate BTC holdings and sits 11th among publicly traded companies globally

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mostly red; DOGE -3%, SHIB -4%, PEPE -5%, TRUMP -4%, PENGU -5%, SPX -4%, FARTCOIN -5%
No notable top movers onchain

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Broadridge enabled on-chain proxy voting for Galaxy (GLXY) shareholders via its Avalanche-powered tokenized governance platform, the first time a public company has brought shareholder proxy voting fully on-chain

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

NFT leaders were mostly mixed; Punks -1% at 28.5 ETH, Pudgy +1% at 4.35 ETH, BAYC +1% at 6.35 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 400 HYPE
Gimboz(+13%) and MAYC (+12%) led notable movers