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Bitcoin Slides Below $77,000 as Bond Market Rout Crushes Crypto Longs

Plus: 🚀 SpaceX pre-IPO price discovery goes live on Hyperliquid | ✂️ Kraken cuts 150 workers after deploying AI, IPO may slip to 2027

Author

Aakash Girimath
May 18, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 📉 Bitcoin slid below $77,000 as $670 million in crypto longs were liquidated over 24 hours in a cascade triggered by a global bond rout, with U.S. 10-year Treasury yields hitting 4.63% Sunday night, the highest since February 2025, and rate-cut odds collapsing to 2% for 2026

  • 🚀 Trade.xyz launched the first SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual contract on Hyperliquid Sunday under the ticker SPCX, with a $150 reference price implying a $1.78 trillion valuation. SPCX spiked to $216 within hours as HYPE rallied 7% against a broadly falling market

  • ✂️ Kraken parent Payward cut roughly 150 workers Thursday after deploying AI tools that improved efficiency, per Bloomberg. The exchange's IPO may slip to 2027 as digital-asset prices weigh on timing

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Bitcoin Slides Below $77,000 as Bond Market Rout Wipes $670 Million in Crypto Longs

Bitcoin slid below $77,000 Monday, extending a four-day decline as a global bond sell-off triggered $670 million in leveraged long liquidations over 24 hours, with the vast majority of the wipeout hitting bullish bets.

The catalysts include rates, U.S. 10-year Treasury yields, which hit 4.63% Sunday night, the highest since February 2025, and above the level that prompted Trump's 90-day tariff pause in April 2025. Rate-cut odds for 2026 have collapsed to 2%, with traders now pricing roughly 50% odds of at least one hike this year. U.S. inflation is nearing 4%, and mortgage rates are approaching 7%.

Solana and XRP each dropped roughly 5%. Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed roughly $1 billion in net outflows over the past week, snapping a six-week inflow streak. The 200-day moving average near $82,000 has rejected bitcoin four times in two weeks.

SpaceX Pre-IPO Price Discovery Goes Live on Hyperliquid

Price discovery for the largest IPO in history is now happening onchain, on Hyperliquid. Trade.xyz, built on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 infrastructure, launched the first SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual contract on Hyperliquid Sunday under the ticker SPCX, a cash-settled derivative that lets traders bet on where the stock will open.

The contract launched with a $150 reference price, implying a roughly $1.78 trillion valuation, based on SpaceX's reported 11.87 billion fully diluted shares. SPCX spiked to $216 within hours, pushing the implied valuation above $2.5 trillion.

HYPE rallied 7% on the listing, outperforming a broadly falling market. SpaceX filed its S-1 confidentially on April 1 and is reportedly targeting June 11 for IPO pricing on Nasdaq.

Kraken Cuts 150 Workers After Deploying AI as IPO May Slip to 2027

Kraken parent Payward eliminated roughly 150 workers Thursday after deploying AI technology that improved efficiency across the company, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The layoffs represent roughly 5% of Kraken's ~3,000-person workforce and are being framed internally as pre-IPO optimization. Bloomberg added that Kraken may not go public as soon as initially expected due to the sharp decline in digital-asset prices, with the IPO possibly slipping to 2027.

The cuts follow an aggressive expansion that has included the acquisitions of NinjaTrader ($1.5B), Reap Technologies ($600M), and Bitnomial ($550M). Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said at Consensus Miami that the exchange is "80% ready" to list.

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  • 💼 Strategy agreed to repurchase $1.5 billion of its 0% convertible notes due 2029 for roughly $1.38 billion, retiring the debt at about 92 cents on the dollar through privately negotiated transactions. The company said it may fund the buyback through cash, at-the-market equity sales, or bitcoin sales, with settlement expected around May 19 and approximately $1.5 billion of the 2029 notes remaining outstanding afterward.

  • 🔗 Lombard Finance will migrate over $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP after an internal security review, becoming the fifth major protocol to leave LayerZero since the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit. The migration pushes total assets moving to Chainlink CCIP past $4 billion, following Kelp DAO, Solv Protocol, Re, and Kraken.

  • 🏛️ House Agriculture leaders urged President Trump to nominate four CFTC commissioners, warning that Chair Michael Selig's status as the sole commissioner since December risks producing rules vulnerable to legal challenge. The bipartisan letter from Chair Glenn Thompson and Ranking Member Angie Craig dropped a day after the Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act in a 15–9 vote.

  • 📋 VanEck and Grayscale filed fresh BNB ETF amendments with the SEC on Friday — VanEck's fifth and Grayscale's second — as the race for the next altcoin spot ETF accelerates. Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart said the parallel filings suggest active SEC engagement, with both products set to list on Nasdaq under tickers VBNB and GBNB.

  • 🎓 Harvard fully exited its $86.8 million ether ETF position and cut its IBIT bitcoin ETF stake by 43% to $117 million in Q1, per 13F filings. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala moved the other way, lifting its IBIT position 16% to roughly $566 million, while Dartmouth disclosed a new position in Bitwise's Solana Staking ETF.

  • 🚨 The Verus-Ethereum bridge appears to have been exploited for approximately $11.5 million on Sunday, with the attacker draining 103.6 tBTC, 1,625 ETH, and 147,000 USDC before swapping everything into 5,402 ETH. PeckShield said the attacker's wallet was funded via Tornado Cash roughly 14 hours before the exploit.

  • 🔓 Aave restored wETH borrowing limits to pre-incident levels across all affected networks after a governance proposal passed Saturday, completing Phase II of the rsETH recovery plan following the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit. TVL on Aave sits at roughly $14.8 billion, down from $23.5 billion in March, with ETH borrowing rates falling to 1.9% as utilization drops below 90%.

  • 🚀 Jito Labs is launching JTX, a consumer trading terminal for spot, futures, and predictions on Solana, starting in July with perps via a Phoenix partnership to follow. CEO Lucas Bruder said a new class of users coming onchain no longer think of themselves as "crypto traders" — they're just traders.

  • 📜 Hyperliquid's new Policy Center argued that onchain perps offer superior efficiency and transparency as ICE and CME reportedly press the CFTC for regulatory oversight of decentralized derivatives platforms.

  • 🔍 The Wall Street Journal profiled the anonymous UMA judges who settle Polymarket disputes, examining how the prediction market's decentralized resolution system handles contested outcomes.

  • ⚙️ Jump Crypto's Firedancer is taking a slow approach to its long-awaited Solana validator client rollout, prioritizing stability over speed as the independent client aims to improve network resilience.

  • 🚔 Alleged Forsage co-founder was extradited from Thailand and pleaded not guilty in the $340 million Ponzi case, marking a significant step in the long-running DOJ prosecution of the Ethereum-based pyramid scheme.

  • 🏛️ Justin Sun's Liberland awarded Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin its top honor, in a ceremony for the self-declared micronation on the Danube.

  • 🎵 Drake called for Sam Bankman-Fried's release in his new, critically panned album, adding a pop culture footnote to the FTX saga.

  • 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia is tokenizing its multi-trillion dollar economy to protect its wealth from global shocks, deploying blockchain infrastructure across oil revenue management, sovereign investments, and public-sector settlements.

  • 🇯🇵 Japan's SBI Securities and Rakuten Securities plan to offer crypto investment trusts, developing the products in-house as Japan's two largest online brokerages race to bring regulated crypto exposure to retail investors.

  • 🤖 SUI Group co-led a $15 million funding round for AI trading lab Nof1 and made a separate strategic investment in Recursive Superintelligence, expanding Sui's footprint in AI-driven onchain trading infrastructure.