On Thursday, altcoins swept lower as bitcoin weakened. The tokens with the biggest losses in the last 24 hours are NEAR, ethena, and Zcash, each declining double digits in the period.

Other tokens have dropped to lows not seen in over a year in the past 24 hours:

• Ethereum dropped 4.4% to under $1,780, a level not seen since April 2025.

• XRP declined 4.5% to an 18-month low last hit in November 2024.

• Solana decreased 6% to trade below the $70 mark, its lowest price since December 2023.

• Dogecoin slid below $0.09, a 27-month low last seen in February 2024.

“Sentiment for crypto is firmly in the gutter as fears surrounding BTC/STRC and its potential overflow compound and overshadow anything that can be read as positive news (e.g. CLARITY movements),” according to Sean Dawson, head of research at crypto options platform Derive.xyz.

“[Altcoins] are high beta plays to BTC and are typically sold heavily in a downturn. Simply put, I’d be even more bearish on alts,” Dawson told Sherwood News.

“Further, liquidity has been drained into this year’s ‘superhot’ narrative of AI/data centers. In other words, there are just better, more exciting opportunities elsewhere,” Dawson added.

One cryptocurrency that has bucked the downtrend has been worldcoin, the native token for World, the digital identity project backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. While the broader crypto market has been pushing lower, WLD has jumped nearly 5% in the last 24 hours and 90% in the past seven days, data from CoinGecko shows.

The price of solana has been struggling, dipping below $76 briefly on Tuesday, a level not seen since February.

Despite the underlying asset suffering, solana ETFs saw $115 million of inflows in May, the highest monthly figure in 2026, data from SoSoValue shows. The investment vehicles have brought in a total of $1.1 billion since their inception last year and have yet to record a monthly outflow.

However, positive ETF flows haven’t swayed traders, who are increasingly negative: prediction market-implied odds of solana dropping under $60 in the year stand at 60%, an increase from 45% three weeks ago.

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have been a way for people in the crypto space to fundraise capital that involved users sending ethereum to a smart contract with the expectation of receiving a project’s tokens.

Despite the popularity of ICOs, a number of projects failed, were unable to meet fundraising goals, and then, for one reason or another, were unable to return investors’ capital. One such example was HongCoin, which aimed to be a decentralized venture fund across borders.

On Sunday morning, blockchain sleuth 0xFlorent announced unlocking 1,003.62 ethereum tokens, worth $2 million, in HongCoin’s 2016 smart contract, enabling the 48 initial investors to claim funds that have been trapped for nine years. Of the investors, two have so far claimed a combined 96.5 ethereum.

The contract held all of the investors’ ethereum and was meant to auto-refund the cryptocurrencies, but “a bug in the refund function quietly broke that, and the funds got stuck,” 0xFlorent said in an X thread.

The HongCoin recovery was the second one the ethereum developer has disclosed in the past eight days. Last Sunday, 0xFlorent said they unlocked over 19.3 ETH, worth $40,590, that were stuck in two old contracts.

As to whether 0xFlorent will unlock more tokens stuck in ICO contracts, the security researcher doesn’t know. “It’s not my main activity and I did it because I found a way to help people. That’s it," 0xFlorent told Sherwood News.

The sui blockchain is stalled again on early Friday, with the last transaction occurring more than two hours ago, data from blockchain explorer Suiscan shows.

“The Sui Core team is actively investigating. Updates and incident review will be shared as soon as they are available,” the team wrote on X.

The ongoing pause comes immediately after experiencing a halt the day before “due to a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced by the 1.72 release,” the team said on Thursday.

SUI, the network’s native cryptocurrency, has dropped around 20% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.

SoFi Technologies announced Wednesday that its 15 million members can now use its stablecoin, SoFiUSD, marking the first time a US national bank-issued stablecoin is available on a banking app, but the markets seem to have really taken notice Friday, sending shares up over 7% in early trading.

Options data as of 9:42 a.m. ET also shows a bullish tilt from traders, with a put/call ratio around 0.16 vs a 20-day average of 0.39.

SoFi’s move is the first step to integrate SoFiUSD into the firm’s broader ecosystem, with plans to allow members to convert the stablecoin into tokenized deposits and roll out SoFiUSD on centralized exchange Bullish.

The stablecoin is currently on ethereum and solana, but the firm aims to add more blockchains to the list.

“We believe we can combine the speed and versatility of the blockchain with the trust of a bank to improve how money moves around the world,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in a statement. “People no longer have to choose between blockchain technology and regulated banking products.”

Since President Trump signed stablecoin legislation GENIUS Act in July last year, the market capitalization of stablecoins has increased nearly 24% to $320.8 billion, data from DefiLlama shows.

Ethereum has dropped 4% in the last 24 hours to trade as low as $1,967 on Thursday morning, a mark not seen since March.

Selling pressure is weighing on the token as “traders are actively opening short positions,” CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno told Sherwood News. “US spot demand for ETH has weakened, as seen by an extremely negative Coinbase price premium approaching levels not seen since February.”

The price action has spurred $237.2 million in liquidations, with the majority of them, $225.1 million, coming from long positions, data from CoinGlass shows. Elsewhere, ethereum ETFs have notched their longest outflow streak this year at 12 days, with Wednesday recording almost $67.2 million in outflows, per SoSoValue.

“ETH’s break below the psychologically important $2,000 level reflects a deterioration in near-term crypto risk sentiment rather than a collapse in Ethereum fundamentals,” according to Coinbridge cofounder and CIO Kelly Ye.

Ye said the drop under $2,000 was amplified by rising volatility and geopolitical tensions amid renewed US-Iran escalation and broader de-risking across high-beta assets.

Sentiment surrounding the cryptocurrency has also softened after David Hoffman, a known ethereum advocate, publicly disclosed offloading his entire ETH position and questioned whether the network’s growth translates to meaningful value accrual to ethereum as an asset, Ye pointed out.

“Still, ETH has continued to hold a broader pattern of higher lows since the April 2025 tariff-driven selloff near $1,500, with the February 2026 low around $1,800 now emerging as the next key level to watch,” Ye told Sherwood News.

“Importantly, on-chain activity has not shown significant deterioration, and Ethereum TVL [total value locked] measured in ETH terms has started trending higher again since May, suggesting underlying network usage remains relatively resilient despite weaker price action,” Ye added.

Some ethereum treasury firms have not stopped their strategy, such as Bit Digital, which announced on Thursday purchasing 8,568 ethereum tokens for $20 million, bringing its total holdings to 158,461.75 tokens.

Meanwhile, other altcoins are also in the red, with solana and dogecoin dropping over 3% in the last 24 hours.

Ethereum has been stuck between $2,000 and $2,150 in the past week amid ongoing scrutiny toward the Ethereum Foundation, which has seen its talent pool thin out.

“ETH continues to show weakness... ETH/BTC keeps grinding lower, at a 10-month low,” Jasper De Maere, a desk strategist and OTC trader at Wintermute, posted on X. “The marginal risk dollar went into equities, not crypto. When AI semis are working and yields are easing, crypto should follow. It didn’t.”

De Maere continued, “Based on our OTC flow, we see that institutional buying pressure, which was responsible for the recent +ve price action, is now fading quickly, indicating that institutional investors might be at capacity or are re-assessing risk/reward at these new levels.”

Data from SoSoValue shows ethereum ETFs have seen 10 consecutive days of outflows, totaling more than $471.1 million.

Meanwhile, the blockchain’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin, who sits on the board of the Ethereum Foundation, addressed the controversy surrounding the nonprofit over the weekend. Holding around 0.16% of ethereum’s total supply, the foundation is not the center of blockchain network, but rather “one node, with a defined purpose alongside other nodes,” according to Buterin, who says nearly 90% of his net worth is in ethereum.

“EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months,” Buterin said, adding that the EF will sell ethereum less and focus on remaining censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure.

“The most high-value ‘product’ of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH,” Buterin continued. “That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset — *necessary* aspects even — that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help.”

Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at crypto trading firm GSR, said Vitalik’s response is a bet on credible neutrality as ethereum’s durable competitive advantage, which attracts liquidity, users, and apps, because “builders and institutions gravitate toward platforms they can trust won’t be captured or co-opted. This is what builds network effects, and network effects are what create durable moats,” Guzman wrote on X.

And yet, Guzman argued credible neutrality is just one piece of the puzzle:

“The risk is that a nimbler chain builds sufficient network effects by executing well on fees, throughput, and UX today while promising credible neutrality tomorrow. Vitalik’s vision is arguably the right one. Whether the ecosystem can execute on it before that window closes remains uncertain.”

Blockchain.com, one of the oldest crypto firms, announced it confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a step toward conducting an initial public offering.

The number of offered shares and price range has yet to be determined, according to a Thursday press release. If the company completes its IPO, Blockchain.com would join Circle and Bullish as crypto companies that have gone public in the year.

Simultaneously, a number of other companies, namely ethereum development firm Consensys, security hardware firm Ledger, and rival crypto exchange Kraken, have paused their plans to IPO due to rough market conditions.

The exchange started in 2011 as a bitcoin search engine before expanding to providing wallets and powering bitcoin transactions. The company raised funds through a series of funding rounds, with a Series D funding round in 2022 giving the firm a $14 billion valuation at the time.