Key takeaways:

Short-term Bitcoin holders realized $11.6 billion in profit over the past 30 days, suggesting a potential pause or local top in the market.

Technical indicators show cooling momentum as retail investor sentiment falls to a 90-day low and liquidity data points to price volatility.

Bitcoin (BTC) price recently hit a new all-time high of $111,800, but the bullish momentum may slow down as onchain data from Glassnode reveals significant profit-taking by short-term holders (STHs), potentially signaling a market “breather.”

Glassnode analysis shows that STHs, often considered traders rather than long-term investors, have realized a staggering $11.6 billion in profits over the last 30 days. This follows a sharp rebound in Bitcoin’s price, pushing past the STH cost-basis of $93,000. The profit-taking peaked at $747 million daily, a rapid increase from the $1.2 billion realized in the last 30-day period, highlighting a shift in new investor sentiment. 

Bitcoin entity-adjusted short-term holder. Source: Glassnode

The STH Realized Profit/Loss Ratio has spiked, with profits now significantly outweighing losses, and only 8% of trading days have seen this ratio at a higher level.

This level of profit-taking is typical during bullish trends but often precedes local market tops. Excessive profit-taking can overwhelm new demand, creating overhead supply resistance and halt Bitcoin’s upward trajectory. 

Crypto analyst Axel Adler Jr noted that Bitcoin’s 30-day price momentum has already slowed by 38%, currently sitting at 19%. Adler described it as a “technical cooldown” after the recent peak. The Bitcoin researcher suggested the market needs a “breather” before potentially resuming its rally.

Similarly, analysis from Hyblock Capital advised caution as the previous three months outlined Bitcoin consistently targeting short liquidity zones above current prices, driving its recent highs. 

However, retail sentiment is at a 90-day low, with only 31.59% of retail accounts holding long positions. Meanwhile, open interest is at a 90-day high, and combined order books sit in the 91st percentile, signaling high liquidity and potential volatility.

Bitcoin aggregate order book and open interest. Source: Hyblock / X

Related: US Bitcoin ETFs near record month after $1.5B inflows in 2 days

Bitcoin open interest dropped by $1.2 billion as BTC fell under $110,000

Bitcoin experienced a sharp decline, dropping to $108,000 from $111,300 before the New York trading session opened on May 23. US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 50% tariff on European Union imports, effective June 1, 2025, triggered the price dump, which sparked global market uncertainty.

The price plunge resulted in a significant $1.2 billion open interest reduction in Bitcoin positions, signaling a wave of deleveraging as traders reduced futures exposure.

LATEST: #Bitcoin open interest exhibits a $1.2 billion position flush after $BTC drops below $110,000. pic.twitter.com/0ee46BiHGD

— Cointelegraph Markets & Research (@CointelegraphMT) May 23, 2025

Despite the initial sell-off, Bitcoin rebounded above $109,000, with speculators dismissing the sell-off period. Regarding the current market trend, crypto trader Honey pointed out that any corrections could be potential buying opportunities. The trader said,

“As expected we pumped and now that the golden cross has happened on BTC, we generally see a market-wide pullback so I’d be cautious here. Dips are for buying.”

Related: Bitcoin price drops 4% as Trump EU tariff talk liquidates over $300M

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

It’s been 30 years since computer scientist Ben Goertzel wrote his first line of AI code, already convinced that artificial intelligence should be decentralized. Today, as the world approaches the dawn of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), who leads this breakthrough could have profound consequences for the future of humanity.

Speaking with Cointelegraph at the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada, Goertzel said, “We’re likely to be able to launch AGI that can think and generalize beyond its training and programming within the next one to three years.”

His project, SingularityNET, is a decentralized ecosystem building a global marketplace for AI services. Along the way, it has secured partnerships with Mind Network and Filecoin Foundation, invested $53 million in a modular supercomputer dedicated to decentralized AGI, and completed a token merger with Ocean Protocol and Fetch.ai to unify efforts in decentralized AI development.

In 2024, Goertzel founded the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, the world’s largest open-source initiative dedicated to decentralized AGI.

SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance are “probably the only serious AGI R&D team outside of Big Tech, certainly the only one in the crypto space, and I don’t mean any slight against others doing cool AI stuff in the crypto space,” Goertzel said. 

For Goertzel, these milestones represent a return to first principles. After decades spent developing AI and championing decentralization, the broader tech world is finally catching up, turning once-radical ideas into drivers of multi-trillion-dollar industries. 

Goertzel and Sam Bourgi at the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada. Source: Cointelegraph

The substance behind decentralization

“In ’93, ’94, ’95, it became clear to me AI should be decentralized,” Goertzel said.

He wrote his first decentralized AI code the following year using a beta version of Java, then founded his first AI company in New York in 1997.

At the time, the internet Goertzel was working with was itself decentralized, so it seemed only natural that AI should be, too.

“What I didn’t foresee then was that the internet would become so centralized, actually, because at that point the internet really was decentralized,” he said.

The internet’s subsequent evolution watered down the foundation of decentralization. “Later on, what happened is, you have Google, you have Facebook, you have Tencent — you have these companies making huge centralized mirrors of the internet on these massive data centers,” he said. 

However, for the next leap into AGI, Goertzel sees decentralization as a foundational safeguard against the monopolization and misuse of the technology. That principle is embedded in the architecture of SingularityNET, Hyperon, and the upcoming ASI Chain, a modular blockchain designed for decentralized AI.

His argument is that AGI must be decentralized from the ground up, not adopted later, if it is to benefit humanity rather than serve concentrated power.

“The way the post-AGI period goes may be quite different depending on whether the decentralized ecosystem plays a role in it or not,” he said, adding:

“We are hoping that we, in collaboration with other decentralized teams, will be the first or among the very first to make it happen.”Goertzel’s ideas on AI and decentralization gained broader mainstream attention after his appearance on episode 1211 of the Joe Rogan Experience: Source: PowerfulJRE

Related: The next frontier for crypto will be decentralizing AI

A brief foray into decentralized money

Perhaps due to his anarchist leanings and desire to “make anarchism real in cyberspace,” Goertzel explored the idea of decentralized money back in the 90s.

As interesting as it sounded back then, Goertzel and his friends concluded that transaction times would be too slow and expensive, rendering the idea impractical.

Just a few decades later, a person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto created the first successful implementation of decentralized money known as Bitcoin (BTC). Ironically, its transactions are still slow and expensive — perhaps by design or due to its growing popularity — so Goertzel’s early skepticism wasn’t entirely misplaced. 

He also admitted that, at the time, he and his friends simply “weren’t good enough at business to hit on the idea of money laundering, selling drugs and guns online and so forth as a business model.” 

He was perhaps half-joking in a nod to the darknet marketplace Silk Road, which enabled anonymous transactions using Bitcoin until it was seized by authorities in 2013.

Magazine: Advanced AI system is already ‘self-aware’ — ASI Alliance founder

Risk appetite across traditional and cryptocurrency markets saw a sharp rise this week, helping United States cryptocurrency funds recover the capital lost to the correction of February and March, amassing over $7.5 billion worth of weekly inflows.

Bitcoin (BTC) surpassed its old all-time high on May 21, two days after President Donald Trump confirmed ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in a May 19 X post.

Meanwhile, popular analyst and Global Macro Investor CEO Raoul Pal warned of more fiat currency debasement, urging investors to gain more exposure to cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as these assets “will never be this cheap again.”

Exponential currency debasement: “You don’t own enough crypto, NFTs”

Cryptocurrencies and NFTs can help investors protect their eroding purchasing power during an era of exponential currency debasement, according to analysts and industry leaders.

Investing in digital assets is becoming increasingly important in the “world of the exponential age and currency debasement,” according to Raoul Pal, founder and CEO of Global Macro Investor.

“You don’t own enough crypto. When you do, you don’t own enough NFT’s, as art is upstream of wealth. Both will never be this cheap again,” Pal said.

NFTs are “the single best long term store of wealth I know and you get to buy it before network effects kick in,” he added in another response.

Source: Raoul Pal

“There is some validity to the statement that NFTs, and in extension art, become a vehicle for the wealthy once a certain level of wealth is reached,” wrote Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at Nansen, calling it a “natural move” for asset diversification.

“For traders and investors, further down the wealth curve, NFTs are partially about speculating on future returns,” he told Cointelegraph, adding that NFTs also benefit from the allure of strong communities, beyond just wealth creation.

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US crypto funds top $7.5 billion inflows in 2025 as investor appetite grows

Crypto investment products in the United States have attracted over $7.5 billion worth of investment in 2025, with a fifth week of net positive inflows last week signaling growing investor demand for digital assets.

US-based crypto investment products attracted $785 million worth of investment last week, pushing the year-to-date (YTD) total to over $7.5 billion, according to a May 19 report by digital asset manager CoinShares.

The latest figure marks the fifth consecutive week of net positive flows, following nearly $7 billion in outflows during February and March.

Weekly crypto asset flows, USD, million. Source: CoinShares

The United States accounted for the bulk of inflows, with $681 million, followed by Germany at $86.3 million and Hong Kong at $24.4 million.

Crypto flows by country. Source: CoinShares

Investor demand for risk assets such as cryptocurrencies staged a significant recovery after the White House announced a 90-day pause on additional tariffs on May 12, which marked a 24% cut for import tariffs for both the US and China.

A day after the announcement, Coinbase exchange saw 9,739 Bitcoin worth more than $1 billion withdrawn from the exchange — the highest net outflow recorded in 2025, signaling that institutional appetite was “accelerating,” according to Bitwise’s head of European research, André Dragosch.

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VanEck to launch Avalanche ecosystem fund

VanEck plans to launch a private digital assets fund in June targeting tokenized Web3 projects built on the Avalanche blockchain network, the asset manager said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph.

The VanEck PurposeBuilt Fund, available only to accredited investors, aims to invest in liquid tokens and venture-backed projects across Web3 sectors, including gaming, financial services, payments, and artificial intelligence. 

Idle capital will be deployed into Avalanche (AVAX) real-world asset (RWA) products, including tokenized money market funds, VanEck said.

The fund will be managed by the team behind VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund (DAAF), which oversees more than $100 million in net assets as of May 21. 

“The next wave of value in crypto will come from real businesses, not more infrastructure,” Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager for DAAF, said in a statement.

RWAs are among crypto’s fastest-growing segments. Source: RWA.xyz

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Yield-bearing stablecoins surge to $11 billion, now 4.5% of market: Report

Yield-bearing stablecoins have soared to $11 billion in circulation, representing 4.5% of the total stablecoin market, a steep climb from just $1.5 billion and a 1% market share at the start of 2024.

One of the biggest winners is Pendle, a decentralized protocol that enables users to lock in fixed yields or speculate on variable interest rates. Pendle now accounts for 30% of all yield-bearing stablecoin total value locked (TVL), roughly $3 billion, according to a report from Pendle compiled by analysts from Spartan Group and Modular Capital shared with Cointelegraph.

The report noted that stablecoins make up 83% of its $4 billion total value locked, a sharp rise from less than 20% just a year ago. In contrast, assets such as Ether (ETH), which historically contributed 80%–90% of Pendle’s TVL, have shrunk to less than 10%.

Traditional stablecoins like USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC) do not pass on interest to holders. With over $200 billion in circulation and US Federal Reserve interest rates at 4.3%, Pendle estimates that stablecoin holders are missing out on more than $9 billion in annual yield.

Pendle TVL share by assets. Source: Pendle

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Tether surpasses Germany’s $111 billion of US Treasury holdings

Tether, the $151 billion stablecoin issuance giant, has surpassed Germany in United States Treasury bill holdings, showcasing the benefits of a diversified reserve strategy that has helped the firm navigate the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.

Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, USDT, has surpassed Germany’s $111.4 billion worth of US Treasurys, data from the US Department of the Treasury shows.

Foreign countries by US Treasury holdings. Source: Ticdata.treasury.gov

Tether has surpassed $120 billion worth of Treasury bills, the firm shared in its attestation report for the first quarter of 2025. That makes Tether the 19th largest entity among all counties in terms of T-bill investments.

“This milestone not only reinforces the company’s conservative reserve management strategy but also highlights Tether’s growing role in distributing dollar-denominated liquidity at scale,” wrote Tether in the report. 

During 2024, Tether was the seventh-largest buyer of US Treasurys across all countries, surpassing Canada, Taiwan, Mexico, Norway, Hong Kong and numerous other countries, Cointelegraph reported in March 2025.

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DeFi market overview

According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.

Worldcoin (WLD) rose over 32% as the week’s biggest gainer in the top 100, followed by the Hyperliquid (HYPE) token, up over 30% on the weekly chart.

Total value locked in DeFi. Source: DefiLlama

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.