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Goldman Files for Bitcoin Premium Income ETF

Goldman Files for Bitcoin Premium Income ETF

Plus: 🔵 Circle hints at Arc token launch | 🛡️ CoW Swap hit by DNS hijack | 🎰 Polymarket cracks down on insider copy-trading apps

Margaret Kuria & David Okoya
April 15, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

📈 Goldman Sachs files with the SEC for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF using a covered-call strategy
🔵 Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says the company is exploring a native token for its Arc blockchain
🛡️ CoW Swap pauses trading after Blockaid detects a DNS hijacking that redirected its frontend to a malicious site
🎰 Polymarket launches audits of Builders Program startups after copy-trading apps marketed access to suspected insider trades

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Goldman Sachs Files for Bitcoin Premium Income ETF

Goldman Sachs filed a preliminary prospectus with the SEC on April 14 for a Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, applying its covered call income strategy to bitcoin for the first time. The filing, submitted under its Goldman Sachs ETF Trust, is still preliminary, with a ticker and price to be determined. It mirrors the structure of the firm's existing GPIX (S&P 500) and GPIQ (Nasdaq-100) premium income funds, which sell call options on top of an index equity portfolio to generate monthly distributions.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas flagged the filing on X. The new fund would bring Goldman's income ETF playbook, which sells 25% to 75% of a portfolio's value in call options under normal circumstances, to the bitcoin market. Goldman already manages $3.5 trillion in assets under supervision and has steadily expanded its bitcoin exposure, accumulating more than $1.1 billion in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) by early 2026.

Circle Is Exploring a Native Token for Its Arc Blockchain

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said at a company event in Seoul on April 14 that the USDC issuer is exploring a native token for Arc Network, its stablecoin-focused layer-1 blockchain. The token would serve governance, incentives, and economic alignment, with a longer-term plan to shift Arc toward a proof-of-stake consensus model.

Arc launched its public testnet in October 2025, and has signed up partners including BlackRock, Visa, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon Web Services. Allaire said a mainnet beta is still targeted for 2026 and that more details on the token would come "in the not too distant future."

Circle (CRCL) shares rose roughly 10% on the day of the announcement. Allaire framed the token exploration as potentially Circle's most significant platform-level move since the creation of USDC.

CoW Swap Hit by DNS Hijack, Users Told to Revoke Approvals

CoW Swap, one of Ethereum's most widely used DEX aggregators, suffered a DNS hijacking on April 14 that redirected its frontend to a malicious site. The attack began at 14:54 UTC, with security firm Blockaid flagging cow.fi as malicious and warning users to revoke approvals immediately and avoid any interaction with the dApp.

CoW DAO confirmed the hijack roughly 90 minutes later, noting that the underlying CoW Protocol smart contracts were not compromised. The team paused the backend and APIs as a precaution and urged users to revoke any approvals made after 14:54 UTC using tools such as revoke.cash. Aave also disabled CoW Swap endpoints for its integrators in response.

As of publication, no confirmed user fund losses had been reported, and the protocol remained paused while the team worked to restore a safe frontend.

Polymarket Audits Startups That Helped Users Copy Suspected Insider Trades

Polymarket has launched an audit of third-party startups built through its Builders Program after finding that some were marketing tools to help users replicate trades from accounts suspected of holding nonpublic information, according to a report from The Information.

The startups, including Polycool and Kreo, offer copy-trading apps that track high-performing accounts, flag unusually large or oddly timed bets, and let users mirror those trades via bots. Polycool went further, publishing a "guide to Polymarket insider trading" on its own website, arguing that "the rules for decentralized prediction markets are a completely different game" from traditional finance.

Polymarket, valued at roughly $20 billion, introduced clearer insider trading rules last month. The audit puts the platform in the uncomfortable position of policing products it helped build.

Uneasy Money Alert 🎧

Join Kain and Taylor as they break down all the big DeFi stories this week!

Tune in at 4pm ET on X, YouTube or PumpFun.

⚛️ Bitcoin developers proposed BIP-361, a three-phase plan to freeze quantum-vulnerable coins and migrate to post-quantum signature types, or face permanent loss of access. Over 34% of all bitcoin had already exposed public keys on-chain as of March 2026.
🔒 XRP Ledger integrated Boundless, a zero-knowledge proving network, enabling private, compliant transactions on its public blockchain for the first time. Institutions can now verify payments without exposing amounts, counterparties, or treasury positions.
🟡 Tether launched tether.wallet, a self-custodial app supporting USDT, USDA, XAUT, and bitcoin across multiple networks, with human-readable addresses and gas-free sends. The company says more than 570 million people already use its technology globally.
🏛️ Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh disclosed over $100 million in wealth via Senate filings, including crypto investments in Solana, dYdX, Polychain, and Polymarket. His confirmation remains blocked while the DOJ pursues a criminal probe of sitting Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
🏦 Visa joined Stripe's Tempo blockchain as an anchor validator alongside Stripe and Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered, after six months of joint engineering work. Tempo launched its mainnet in March and is built for stablecoin payments and agentic commerce.
📉 Bitmine posted a $3.8 billion quarterly net loss driven by a $3.775 billion unrealized decline in its ETH holdings, per SEC filings. The firm still holds 4.47 million ETH and generated $10.2 million in staking revenue as it pushes its Ethereum treasury strategy.
📊 Strategy's STRC hit $1.1 billion in daily volume, a new record up 46.5% from its prior high, coinciding with a disclosure that the firm bought 13,927 BTC for $1 billion funded entirely through preferred stock proceeds.
🌐 X rolled out Cashtags for iPhone users in the US and Canada, showing live price charts and posts for stocks and crypto directly in the timeline. A pilot with Wealthsimple lets Canadian users route trades from the app.
🔵 Ether.fi committed $3 billion in ETH — about 40% of its holdings — to ETHGas as validator liquidity over three years, establishing the supply foundation for a forward market in Ethereum blockspace futures.
🔐 The Ethereum Foundation launched a $1 million Audit Subsidy Program with Areta, Nethermind, and Chainlink Labs, covering up to 30% of audit costs for selected mainnet builders through a monthly cohort process across 20+ firms.
⚙️ The Solana Foundation announced RPC 2.0 with Triton One, Helius, Jupiter, Anza, and Jump Firedancer, moving Solana's read layer out of the validator entirely to rebuild data access infrastructure from the ground up.

🌐 SIX Group, which operates major European stock exchanges including the Swiss Exchange and BME, is now feeding real-time market data to Chainlink, expanding the oracle network's traditional finance data coverage significantly.
🇯🇵 Rakuten, Japan's e-commerce and financial services giant, will allow its 44 million customers to use XRP as a payment method, adding a major retail gateway for the token in one of crypto's most active adoption markets.

💰 Mintlify raised a $45 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures for its developer documentation platform, which uses AI to auto-generate and maintain technical docs from code.
💸 Paxos Labs raised $12 million and launched Amplify, a platform for building onchain financial products, as a spin-out from Paxos focused on institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure.

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