With bitcoin holding above $78,000, Strategy's Michael Saylor posted "Winter's Over" on X — complete with a Game of Thrones-style image on horseback — declaring a new phase for the market. Analyst Mati Greenspan mostly agreed, arguing the recent slump was a pullback inside a broader bull market, not a true crypto winter, and that bitcoin has likely already bottomed. The real debate is what comes next: Greenspan and others say institutional accumulation is just the first leg, with nation-state adoption — central banks adding BTC alongside gold — as the cycle that follows. Not everyone is buying it: other analysts warn altcoins are still very cold, and that the four-year halving cycle hasn't been declared dead yet.
Independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli just won Project Eleven's 1 BTC Q-Day Prize — worth roughly $78,000 — after breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on publicly accessible quantum hardware using a variant of Shor's algorithm. That's 512 times larger than the previous public demonstration in September 2025. Bitcoin still uses 256-bit security, so the attack is far from threatening real wallets — but theoretical resource estimates for a full break have fallen sharply, with a Google paper now putting the threshold below 500,000 physical qubits. Roughly 6.9 million BTC sit in wallets with exposed public keys. The urgency around post-quantum migration plans like BIP-360 is growing.
The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — the probe into renovation cost overruns that Republican Senator Thom Tillis had been using to block Kevin Warsh's confirmation. Within minutes of the announcement, Kalshi odds on Warsh being confirmed before May 15 jumped from 30% to over 80%. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro handed the matter to the Fed's inspector general, but reserved the right to restart the criminal probe. Powell's term as Fed chair expires next month — though he may remain on the board through 2028, keeping a vote on interest rates regardless of who takes the chair.
