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Metaplanet’s enterprise value sinks below its bitcoin holdings

Bitcoin’s price is dropping again Tuesday as one expert warns the current environment is a “toxic cocktail.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Japanese public company Metaplanet is the latest bitcoin treasury whose enterprise value has dropped below its bitcoin holdings, with the stock sinking 12% Tuesday.

Metaplanet, the fourth-largest bitcoin treasury, has 30,823 bitcoin and saw its mNAV (“the ratio of its market capitalization and debt to its token holdings,” according to Bloomberg) drop to 0.99, per its website. Shares are down 19% in the past month, while bitcoin is down 4% over the same time frame.

Greg Cipolaro, global head of research at NYDIG, wrote that while investors “might’ve been enticed by some eye-popping short-term gains by some of the early DATs [digital asset treasuries],” most of the gains exist “only on paper for most investors.”

“When liquidity is finally unlocked, investors are finding in many cases that gains, if any, are hard to come by, and some are stuck with losses. Investors are beginning to recognize these dynamics, and coupled with the lack of clear strategy differentiation among DATs, this has led to significant underperformance of DATs relative to bitcoin,” Cipolaro wrote.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, dropped to the $110,000 range Tuesday morning, down 4% in the past 24 hours, as tariff battles and uncertain domestic and geopolitical climates continue to weigh on the crypto market overall.

Despite the weekend’s massive liquidations, Citi analysts wrote that their 12-month forecast for bitcoin remains unchanged, at $181,000, “predicated on continued flows, while the bear case is likely if we see equity weakness.” Citi’s year-end forecast is still $133,000.

Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, said that the weekend sell-off is a brutal reminder that as the crypto market grows and matures, the risks are amplified.

“In this environment, thin liquidity, overleverage, and the involvement of big players make for a toxic cocktail,” he said, adding that bitcoin now faces another uphill battle to break past key resistance levels that will allow it to reach a meaningful new all-time high this year.

Bitcoin ETFs also bled out on Monday, with $326.52 million in outflows. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust was the sole fund seeing inflows yesterday, amassing $69.3 million, SoSoValue data shows.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

$389M

US Attorney David Metcalf announced Thursday the arrests of Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, alleged senior members of AudiA6, a cryptocurrency money-laundering service believed to be responsible for laundering over $389 million.

The arrests coincided with a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure, involving the search of three properties, the seizure of servers and domains connected to the organization, as well as freezing cryptocurrency assets, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Tkachuk and Ledenev were “charged by criminal complaint with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering,” the DOJ said. If convicted, they face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.

Per the criminal complaint, AudiA6 offered services to conceal the origin of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity, charging fees of up to 5% of the amount laundered.

The two defendants are in custody of Republic of Georgia authorities, and the US Attorney’s Office aims to seek their extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

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