Crypto Market Update - May 19 * Market Snapshot: Markets saw a surge with BTC briefly touching $78K before retracing to $76K. The crypto market sentiment index registered "extreme fear" at 25. * Macro Impact: President Trump's repeated postponement of plans to attack Iran caused significant market volatility, marked by five reversals. * Spot ETF Flows (May 18): * BTC: -$200.2M outflow (BlackRock data unavailable) * ETH: -$28.8M outflow (BlackRock data unavailable) * SOL: +$2.1M inflow * XRP: +$10.9M inflow * Regulatory News: The SEC is anticipated to finalize the legal framework for tokenized shares this week. * Ethereum Foundation Departures: Two key personnel have departed: * Carl Beek (7 years), Beacon Chain architect instrumental in Ethereum's PoS transition. * Julian Ma (4 years), author of EIP-7805, which reduced L1-L2 bridging time to approximately 13 seconds. * Institutional Activity: Goldman Sachs divested XRP ETF (~$152M) and SOL ETF (~$108M) holdings in Q1, while maintaining over $700M in BTC ETF. * Security Breach: Echo Protocol on Monad was exploited, leading to the theft of 384 ETH (~$821K). This is the first hack reported on the Monad chain. * Major Holdings: * Strategy (MicroStrategy): Acquired 24,869 BTC ($2B), increasing total holdings to 843,738 BTC (~$64.7B). * Bitmine: Acquired an additional 71,672 ETH (~$150M), bringing its total holdings to nearly 5.3 million ETH (~$11.1B).