hodler

12 Apr 2026, 14:16

Oil futures up 7% on Hyperliquid as Trump orders Naval blockade of Hormuz

Oil prices spiked on the Hyperliquid platform after President Donald Trump ordered a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz

12 Apr 2026, 13:46

Bitcoin slips below $71,000 as Trump orders blockade of Strait of Hormuz

"Effective immediately, the United States Navy ... will begin the process of blockading any and all ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz," said the president in a social media post.

12 Apr 2026, 13:36

Justin Sun blasts Trump-backed WLF as ‘personal ATM’ scheme after $75M loan

Tron ( TRX ) founder Justin Sun has criticized World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, accusing the platform of operating in a way that undermines core decentralized finance principles and exploits its user base. Sun, an early and major investor in the project, said his backing was initially driven by its stated mission to advance financial freedom through decentralized infrastructure, as he noted in an X post on April 12. However, he now claims that key elements of the platform were not disclosed to investors, including a smart contract mechanism that allows the team to unilaterally freeze or restrict user-held tokens. According to Sun, this function effectively grants centralized control over user assets, contradicting the project’s public positioning as a decentralized platform. He further alleged that his own wallet was blacklisted in 2025, making him one of the largest affected investors and raising broader concerns about investor protections within the ecosystem. ‘Hidden controls’ The cryptocurrency billionaire also accused the project’s operators of embedding hidden controls, extracting fees without transparency, and restricting access to funds without due process. “Every action taken by the WLFI team to extract fees from users, to secretly implant backdoor controls over user assets, to freeze investor funds without disclosure or due process, and to treat the crypto community as a personal ATM — all of these actions are illegitimate and were never authorized by any fair, transparent, or good-faith community governance process,” Sun said. He argued that the governance processes cited by the team to justify these actions lack fairness, with limited participation, withheld information, and predetermined outcomes. Sun’s criticism comes just days after World Liberty Financial moved 5 billion WLFI tokens to the DeFi lending platform Dolomite as collateral, securing approximately $75 million in stablecoin loans. The deposit now represents a dominant share of the platform’s liquidity, accounting for the majority of its roughly $794 million total supply. The timing of the transaction has intensified scrutiny around the project’s operations, with Sun warning that such practices risk eroding trust among investors and the broader crypto community. He has called for the unlocking of affected tokens and greater transparency, urging the project to realign with principles of fairness and accountability in decentralized finance. The post Justin Sun blasts Trump-backed WLF as ‘personal ATM’ scheme after $75M loan appeared first on Finbold .

12 Apr 2026, 13:00

Super PAC tied to Tether makes first ad buy from firm founded by Tether's U.S. CEO

The Fellowship PAC spent $300,000 with Nxum Group that was co-founded by Bo Hines, the chief of Tether's U.S. arm and former adviser to President Donald Trump.

12 Apr 2026, 11:30

Bitcoin Stalls Near $73K as US-Iran Talks Collapse, Markets Hold Their Breath

Bitcoin is trading at $71,587 on Sunday morning with a market cap of $1.43 trillion and a 24-hour trading volume of $28.39 billion, moving within an intraday range of $71,484 to $73,720. The price drop followed comments from U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who disclosed that the United States failed to reach an agreement with

12 Apr 2026, 11:22

Analysts prepare to measure China's local chip industry with DeepSeek's April model launch

DeepSeek is hiring workers in Inner Mongolia for its late April launch, its first big release built to run on Huawei processors instead of American ones. The firm also posted openings for server maintenance engineers and delivery managers in Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia. The Hangzhou company hasn’t advertised on-site jobs for its computing infrastructure before. The V4 set for late April uses a Mixture-of-Experts design with about 1 trillion parameters total, though just 32 to 37 billion work on any task. That keeps costs down as the model gets bigger. “If they have successfully trained V4 entirely on Huawei silicon, it signals a material shift in the geopolitical tech landscape,” said Stephen Wu from Carthage Capital. The release has been pushed back twice from February. Silicon Valley rivals unite against Chinese firms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google said April 6 they’d share intelligence to stop Chinese companies from copying their models. The three competitors are working together through the Frontier Model Forum, an industry group from 2023. Anthropic tracked 16 million exchanges from three Chinese firms across about 24,000 fake accounts. The companies allegedly used adversarial distillation, flooding ChatGPT and Claude with queries, then training their models on the responses. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of copying its models “through new, obfuscated methods” in a February 12 memo to the House Select Committee on China. The restrictions that started in 2022 to slow China’s AI development first led to chip output dropping 9.8% in 2022. However, those export controls on advanced chips seem to now be backfiring. Domestic chips projected to reach 50% market share Things are shifting. TrendForce projects domestic chips will reach 50% of China’s AI chip market in 2026. Chinese semiconductor equipment went from 25% to 35% of the home market between 2024 and 2025, beating the Made in China 2025 target of 30%. China has put about $150 billion into chip development. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act authorized $52.7 billion. The switch to Huawei chips has not been without delays. As reported by Cryptopolitan previously, DeepSeek was expected to use banned Nvidia chips without revealing any technical signs. Moving away from Nvidia takes “substantial re-engineering,” according to Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research. “That transition can slow development cycles and introduce performance trade-offs, especially for V4, a model expected to be state-of-the-art,” he said. DeepSeek first gained prominence in January 2024 with R1, a reasoning model President Trump called a “wake-up call” for American companies. The company’s cheap tools are used widely in China and places like Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .