Andrew Kang, founder of the crypto venture firm Mechanism Capital, has seemingly doubled down on his bet that Bitcoin will gain in price with a $200 million long position, onchain data shows. 

“Andrew Kang just doubled his Bitcoin position,” crypto analytics firm Arkham said in an April 12 X post. It explained a crypto address tied to Kang made another $100 million long bet on Bitcoin (BTC) with an expected profit, or loss, of $6.8 million.

On April 9, Arkham noted that the Kang-tied wallet had put on a $100 million leverage-long bet on Bitcoin after US President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social platform earlier the same day that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

Just hours later, the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on its global hiked tariff regime, which sent crypto and stocks rallying. The tariffs, first unveiled on April 2, had gone live just hours earlier and had tanked most financial markets.

Kang said in an April 12 X post that trade war capitulation and a “Trump put”  — the belief that the president will work to bump the stock market — “are the perfect combination for BTC to reverse a multi month downtrend.”

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats called on the Securities and Exchange Commission in an April 11 letter to launch an insider trading and market manipulation probe into Trump and his affiliates over the post, which they said “appears to have previewed his plans” to pause the tariffs.

Bitcoin choppy on tariff confusion

Bitcoin has seen an over 2% swing over the past 24 hours as the Trump administration went back and forth on tariff exemptions for Chinese electronic goods.

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Bitcoin hit a 24-hour low of $83,197, wiping most of the gains it made before the weekend, but it has since recovered to trade flat over the past day at around $85,000 after briefly hitting a top of $85,315, CoinGecko data shows.

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 13 that “there was no tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday,” April 11, but that levies on Chinese electronics are “moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket’” of 20%.

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The team behind real-world tokenized asset blockchain Mantra says its native token’s sudden 90% plunge was caused by exchanges forcibly closing positions without notice, with one currently unnamed exchange potentially to blame. 

On April 13, Mantra (OM) price dropped from $6.30 to below $0.50, rapidly shedding over 90% of its $6 billion market cap.

“We have determined that the OM market movements were triggered by reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges on OM account holders,” Mantra co-founder John Mullin wrote in an April 13 statement on X.

“The timing and depth of the crash suggest that a very sudden closure of account positions was initiated without sufficient warning or notice,” he added. 

“That this happened during low-liquidity hours on a Sunday evening UTC, early morning Asia time, points to a degree of negligence at best, or possibly intentional market positioning taken by centralized exchanges.”

Mullin told an X user they believe one exchange “in particular” was to blame but said they were still “figuring out the details.” He told others that the centralized exchange in question wasn’t Binance. 

Mantra has an upcoming community connect on X, where Mullin says the team would share more information.

Some traders allege the token collapse was a rug pull, while others are speculating the Mantra team had used their tokens as collateral to take out a massive loan from a centralized exchange and the team fell prey to a loan risk parameter change, then a margin call.

Mullin denied these theories in follow-up X posts, saying, “The team did not have a loan outstanding” and haven't orchestrated a rug pull.  

“Tokens remain locked and subject to the published vesting periods. OM’s tokenomics remain intact, as shared last week in our latest token report. Our token wallet addresses are online and visible,” Mullin said.

The price of OM staged a minor recovery in the aftermath of the price collapse, briefly returning above $1, but it is back down and currently trading around $0.7894, according to CoinGecko.

The token hit an all-time high of just under $9 on Feb. 23 and is now down over 91% from that figure.

Millions of Mantra tokens moved in the week prior to collapse 

Blockchain analytics platform Spot On Chain said in an April 14 post to X that some OM whales moved 14.27 million tokens to the crypto exchange OKX three days before the crash. In March, the same whales picked up 84.15 million OM for $564.7 million.

“Now, after a brutal 90% drop, their remaining 69.08 million OM is worth just $62.2 million, putting their total estimated loss at a staggering $406.3 million,” Spot On Chain said.

“However, they may have hedged the position elsewhere, and it’s possible they contributed to the sharp drop.”

At the same time, blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain said that since April 7, at least 17 wallets deposited 43.6 million OM into crypto exchanges, representing 4.5% of the circulating supply. 

Related: Mantra unveils $108M fund to back real-world asset tokenization, DeFi

In January 2025, Mantra and investment conglomerate DAMAC signed a $1 billion deal to tokenize the investment conglomerate’s various assets. 

Meanwhile, Mantra announced on Feb. 19 that it had received a virtual asset service provider license from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority.

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Crypto markets have been fairly stable amid wider market panic caused by US President Donald Trump’s “on-again, off-again” sweeping global tariffs, according to a New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) analyst.

“Despite the carnage in traditional financial markets, the crypto markets have been relatively orderly,” NYDIG global head of research Greg Cipolaro said in an April 11 note. “Historically, in broad risk-off moves, we tend to see stresses show up in crypto markets. We have yet to see that.”

Cipolaro said crypto perpetual futures rates have “been persistently positive,” with liquidations spiking on April 6 and 7 in the days after Trump first announced the tariffs on April 2 but only to a total of $480 million, which he added “was well below other notable liquidation events.”

He noted that the price of Tether (USDT), a US dollar-tracking stablecoin widely used token in crypto trading, was below $1 but had “not experienced a sharp decline.” 

Trump unveiled a sweeping tariff regime on April 2 that lumped various levies on every country before pausing them for 90 days just hours after they came into effect on April 5 and instead charging a base tariff of 10%, besides China, which currently has tariffs of up to 145%.

Traditional and crypto markets tanked after Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement, and many assets haven’t recovered to the same level as before their unveiling.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration caused more confusion with its tariffs, saying on April 13 that an April 11 decision to exempt many electronics from tariffs was temporary and they would still be hit with levies.

Bitcoin fares well, declining volatility to make it widely attractive

Cipolaro said that Bitcoin (BTC) didn’t escape the market volatility, “but at current prices has fared far better than many other asset classes.”

He added that Bitcoin’s volatility hasn’t risen to historic levels, unlike the traditional markets, and “has been relatively stable” despite instability instigated by the Trump administration.

“Perhaps investors are increasingly searching for stores of value not tied to sovereign countries and thus not affected by the trade turmoil.”

Bitcoin is down 22.5% from its mid-January peak of over $108,000 and has traded flat over the past 24 hours at $84,730, according to CoinGecko.

Cipolaro said the narrowing gap between Bitcoin’s volatility and other assets makes it “increasingly more appealing” to funds with risk parity portfolios — those that use risk to choose asset allocations.

He added that investors are likely reducing their risk exposure but “perhaps some reallocation of asset mix to Bitcoin is one of the reasons it has been more buoyant.”

Related: S&P 500 briefly sees ‘Bitcoin-level’ volatility amid Trump tariff war

“Risk parity funds allocating to Bitcoin can help dampen its volatility — making the asset more attractive and potentially reinforcing a virtuous cycle of increased adoption and stability,” Cipolaro said.

However, YouHodler chief of markets Ruslan Lienkha told Cointelegraph in an April 12 note that despite a wider market rebound, “technical indicators are painting a concerning picture.”

He said a “death cross,” when the 50-day moving average crosses below the 200-day moving average, is potentially forming on Bitcoin and the S&P 500.

Lienkha said the pattern is “generally considered a bearish signal for the medium term, suggesting that markets may struggle to sustain upward momentum without a clear catalyst or a stream of positive macroeconomic developments.” 

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues it’s Ethereum’s application layer, not its infrastructure layer, where Ethereum needs “good social philosophy” the most.

The app layer is where developers build decentralized applications on top of Ethereum’s base infrastructure and where they make decisions about how these programs operate. 

In an April 12 post on the social media platform Warpcast, Buterin responded to a user’s argument that Ethereum needs a new generation of developers rooted in Ethereum’s core values to renew itself. He argued that it’s the app layer that needs this more.

“Apps are 80% special purpose. What apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what Ethereum apps, and Ethereum as a whole, are there to do for the world. And so having good ideas on this topic out there becomes crucially important,” Buterin said. 

In comparison, Buterin says a programming language like C++ may not be as influenced by the creator’s ideology, as it is a general-purpose tool that doesn’t have much surface to be made worse or improved by social philosophy. 

“Imagine that C++ had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not,” he said.

Ethereum’s layer 1 is similar to an extent, argued Buterin, though it is more exposed to philosophical influence, citing its move to proof-of-stake (PoS) and supporting light clients as examples.  

“Someone who doesn’t believe in decentralization would not add light clients, or good forms of account abstraction,” he said. 

“Someone who doesn’t mind energy waste would not spend half a decade moving to PoS, but the Ethereum Virtual Machine opcodes might have been roughly the same either way. So Ethereum is perhaps 50% general-purpose,” Buterin added. 

Apps with good social philosophy vs bad  

In a follow-up post, Buterin told a user that in his opinion, crypto privacy protocol Railgun, Web3 social protocol Farcaster, decentralized prediction market Polymarket and messenger app Signal are examples of apps with a good social philosophy. 

“You build apps that do the right thing behind the scenes by default. Signal is a reasonably good example of this, though it has significant flaws of its own. Farcaster is also a good example of this,” Buterin said.

Related: Vitalik Buterin criticizes crypto’s moral shift toward gambling

On the other hand, Buterin said the memecoin platform Pump.fun, the collapsed crypto ecosystem Terra, its native token Terra (LUNA), and the collapsed crypto exchange FTX are examples of bad social philosophy.

“The differences in what the app does stem from differences in beliefs in developers’ heads about what they are here to accomplish,” he said. 

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The Trump family-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) has added 4.89 million SEI tokens valued at $775,000 to its portfolio, according to onchain data.

Data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows the purchase was made on April 12 by one of WLFI’s trading wallets using USDC transferred from the project’s main wallet. It’s the same trading wallet previously used by WLFI to accumulate other altcoins.

WLFI holds a diversified portfolio, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and a larger number of altcoins, such as Tron (TRX), Ondo Finance (ONDO), Avalanche (AVAX) and now Sei (SEI).

According to blockchain researcher Lookonchain, WLFI has spent a total of $346.8 million accumulating 11 different tokens, but as of April 12, it has yet to see a profit on any of them. The project’s Ethereum investments alone are currently down over $114 million. 

Overall, Lookonchain says WLFI’s portfolio is down $145.8 million.

Only two months ago, in a Feb. 3 X post, Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, urged his followers to buy Ether, writing: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH.” Originally, the tweet also included “you can thank me later,” but it was edited to remove those five words.

At the time of writing, data from CoinGecko showed ETH’s price had fallen 55% since Eric Trump’s tweet, currently trading at $1,611, down from the Feb. 3 close of $2,879.

Related: Democrats slam DOJ’s ‘grave mistake’ in disbanding crypto crime unit

WLFI’s USD1 logo appears on major exchanges

Meanwhile, an icon for WLFI’s stablecoin, USD1, has appeared on Coinbase, Binance and the crypto aggregator website CoinMarketCap in what appears to be the coin’s unofficial logo unveiling. 

WLFI has made no official announcement about USD1’s logo.

Trump’s involvement with USD1 has attracted criticism from lawmakers on both sides of US politics. At an April 2 US House Financial Services Committee hearing on stablecoin legislation, Democratic Representative Maxine Waters suggested President Trump may be ultimately planning to use USD1 to replace the US dollar.

“Trump likely wants the entire government to use stablecoins, from payments made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Social Security payments to paying taxes. And which coin do you think Trump would replace the dollar with? His own, of course.”

The committee’s Republican chair, French Hill, aired similar concerns.

“If there is no effort to block the president of the United States of America from owning his stablecoin business [...] I will never be able to agree on supporting this bill, and I would ask other members not to be enablers.”

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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walked back the recent reciprocal tariff exemption on select electronics announced in an April 12 bulletin from the United States Customs and Border Protection.

On April 13, Lutnick told ABC News that the reciprocal tariff exemption was temporary until the administration established a sector tariff regime for semiconductor products, which includes phones, graphics processors, and computing chips in a "month or two." Lutnick added:

"President Trump has called out pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and autos. He called them sector tariffs, and those are not available for negotiation. They are just going to be part of making sure we ensure core national security items are made in this country."

"We can't be relying on China for fundamental things we need. Our medicines and our semiconductors need to be built in America," Lutnick continued. The official also said he was confident that the US and China would arrive at a trade deal through negotiations.

The emphasis on national security and onshoring critical industries could signal that the trade tariffs will be a long-term geostrategic policy and not simply a short-term negotiation tactic to make US exports more attractive, as some analysts have suggested.

Related: Bitcoin ‘decouples,’ stocks lose $3.5T amid Trump tariff war and Fed warning of ‘higher inflation’

Trade war heightens volatility and sends markets tumbling

Trump's trade tariffs crashed the stock and crypto markets, wiping away trillions in shareholder value as investors dumped riskier assets on fears of a lengthy trade war between the United States and its trading partners.

In an April 10 X Post, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas cited the SPY US Equity History Volume chart as evidence that the S&P 500 stock market index is now more volatile than Bitcoin (BTC).

According to the analyst, the S&P 500 Index hit a volatility level of 74 in April, compared to Bitcoin's 71.

Stocks and crypto pumped following rumors of the Trump administration initiating a 90-day reciprocal tariff pause. Approximately $2 trillion was pumped into stocks on rumors of softer trade policies.

Much of this value was then wiped away when Trump claimed that rumors of a 90-day pause were false and returned once the Trump administration did, in fact, issue a reciprocal tariff pause in the following days.

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