The crypto market has seen a notable uptick in activity this week, with total market capitalization rising by 10% over the past seven days.
This surge reflects renewed investor interest, particularly among large holders, who have strategically accumulated select altcoins.
Uniswap (UNI)
Uniswap’s governance token UNI is one of the tokens crypto whales bought this week. This is evidenced by its large holders’ netflow, up 492% over the past seven days.
The large holders’ netflow measures the difference between the amount of tokens that whales buy and sell over a specified period. When it surges like this, it signals strong accumulation by whales, suggesting growing confidence or a bullish outlook on the asset.
If whale accumulation persists, UNI could extend its rally to $7.10. On the other hand, if demand leans, UNI could shed recent gains and fall to $4.60.
MANTRA (OM)
OM’s recent price downturn has opened the door for strategic accumulation by some of its largest holders. According to on-chain data from Santiment, whale addresses holding between 10 million and 100 million OM tokens scooped up 26 million OM during the week under review.
This accumulation trend follows a dramatic collapse in OM’s price on April 13. The token suffered a flash crash that erased over 90% of its value in less than an hour, wiping out more than $5.5 billion in market capitalization.
The price plunge shook retail sentiment, but whales appear to have viewed it as a discounted entry point, positioning themselves for a potential recovery.
If this trend continues, OM could rally above $1. However, once selloffs resume, its price could fall to $0.022.
Worldcoin (WLD)
Sam Altman-linked WLD is another altcoin that crypto whales bought this week. On-chain data shows that whales holding between 1 million and 10 million tokens have acquired 13 million WLD over the past week.
This group of WLD investors holds 798.06 million tokens at press time, marking their highest recorded balance. If WLD whales increase their accumulation, its price could rally back above $1.
On the other hand, if selloffs continue, it could fall to $0.57.
At Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down with Andrey Fedorov, the Chief Marketing Officer and acting Chief Business Development Officer at STON.fi, to dive deep into the platform’s mission, roadmap, and broader views on the DeFi sector.
Andrey Fedorov shared insights into how Omniston, a liquidity aggregation protocol developed by STON.fi, aims to simplify and streamline decentralized liquidity access across the TON blockchain and beyond. It presents a unified integration point for DeFi apps, liquidity providers, and users alike.
Andrey Fedorov on Omniston
Omniston is a decentralized liquidity aggregation protocol that connects DeFi apps to TON liquidity. This protocol is built for the TON blockchain, which means that when users want to swap TON-based tokens, Omniston finds the best deals. I’d say this is a protocol and not an exchange in itself, but it does connect apps, for example, for some exchanges, wallets, games, some other apps that need to access liquidity. So, there are users in these apps who want to swap and trade tokens.
Andrey Fedorov at Paris Blockchain Week
Usually, DeFi apps need to find and integrate with various liquidity sources — a process that’s time-consuming, complex, and often expensive due to the integration work involved. That’s where Omniston comes in. Basically, instead of connecting to five or ten different liquidity sources one by one, you just integrate with Omniston once. It’s like this one plug-in point.
So when a DeFi app connects to Omniston, it automatically gets access to all these different liquidity sources that are already connected. And it works both ways — liquidity providers, market makers, and anyone who has liquidity, they also get access to the user base of those apps.
And the cool thing is, anyone can plug into Omniston. If you have access to liquidity, whether it’s on-chain (like liquidity pools or vaults) or off-chain (like private funds), you can integrate through Omniston. This makes your liquidity available to all the apps connected to Omniston.
As a result, users benefit from deeper liquidity, and liquidity providers can earn yield by serving those users. We use the term “liquidity providers” broadly — it includes market makers and any other entities that can supply liquidity.
About Omniston’s roadmap
Right now, Omniston is mainly focused on providing access — so we’re not charging anything at this stage. The idea is really to drive usage. We want people to connect and start building with it. Liquidity providers can already earn money, and the same goes for DeFi apps — they can build on top of Omniston and create their own revenue models.
As for monetization on our side, we think it’ll come, but probably not in the traditional ‘pay-to-use’ way. We just launched about a month ago, so it’s still very early. The priority right now is adoption. We want to get more apps plugged in, more liquidity providers onboarded. Once we scale that up, we’ll explore monetization options — but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll start charging across the board.
The STON.fi team is still finalizing KPIs. We’re testing everything live — this is a working product — so we’re figuring out the numbers as we go. But if I had to name one core metric right now, it’s connectivity. We want to connect as many applications as possible, and aggregate as much liquidity as we can. That’s the north star for us.
Looking at the roadmap, the next big step is cross-chain swaps. Omniston currently runs on the TON blockchain, but we’ve already built the architecture for cross-chain functionality, and we’re actively testing it. Over the next few months, we’ll be working on integration testing.
Of course, we’re taking it step by step. The next chain will likely be Tron, and then we’ll move into EVM ecosystems. But it’s not going to be all at once — we’re rolling this out gradually.
TON — The Ideal Blockchain for Omniston?
There are two reasons why we chose TON. First, it is a technically strong blockchain. Second, it’s rapidly becoming the native chain of Telegram, which has a massive user base of over one billion people.
TON helps us access these huge markets. A technically strong blockchain plus a huge market is a good fit. Additionally, the TON ecosystem offers solid developer support and growing resources, making it a compelling platform on which to build.
I would also add that the TON ecosystem is growing very fast, with strong support from the TON Foundation. Plus, with so many projects on the chain, they craft good documentation that shows the use cases and so on. For developers building on TON, this means they benefit not just from the strong support but also from the collective experience and momentum of the broader community — which is incredibly valuable.
The Impact of Crypto and Blockchain Regulation
First of all, I don’t think regulation is a limitation per se. It’s something we monitor closely, and we take all regulatory developments into account as we grow.
I would say that Europe has made some progress over here because of MiCA. Regulation in the United States is fragmented, but we still need to watch them closely. Our goal is to remain fully compliant — and we view that as necessary and inevitable.
Promising Crypto Trends
Everybody is speaking about AI agents. The concept is definitely compelling and has strong future potential, but the challenge is that there aren’t many clear, practical use cases yet. What we need to do now is find these good use cases, and currently, I would say that there are not so many. That’s the problem. But again, we need to watch this space closely.
From what I understand, AI agents are already being used to evaluate whether there is a balance in the market. It is interesting to use them for this specific test case, but this is only one. It is the most obvious one.
There’s definitely room to explore more impactful ways to combine AI with crypto. It’s an area worth studying closely, and while we’re still in the early stages, I don’t see any fundamental limitations holding us back.
Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency, has reshaped how people worldwide perceive finance and money. However, as technology advances and external factors evolve, Bitcoin faces structural challenges that could impact its future existence and growth.
A recent discussion among industry leaders highlighted major risks that could pose a black swan event for Bitcoin’s future.
What Is the Biggest Threat to Bitcoin?
Lyn Alden, founder of Lyn Alden Investment, recently asked, “What is the biggest structural risk to Bitcoin in the next 5-10 years?” This question sparked significant attention and responses from investors, experts, and industry leaders, shedding light on pressing concerns.
One of the most frequently mentioned risks is the threat posed by quantum computing. Nic Carter, general partner at Castle Island Ventures, responded concisely: “Quantum.” His answer received widespread agreement.
“I increasingly agree. That was the catalyst for my thread/question, tbh,” Lyn Alden replied to Nic Carter.
Future quantum computers could break the encryption algorithms securing Bitcoin, such as the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which safeguards Bitcoin wallets. If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer emerges, it could forge digital signatures, allowing attackers to steal Bitcoin from any wallet with an exposed public key.
According to research by River, a quantum computer with 1 million qubits could crack a Bitcoin address. Microsoft has claimed that its new chip, named Majorana, is paving the way toward this milestone. This raises an urgent question: how much time does Bitcoin have before it must become quantum-resistant?
While the quantum computing threat is apparent, some argue that a more immediate challenge is whether the Bitcoin community can reach a consensus and implement quantum-resistant solutions in time.
“That’d be not coming to a consensus fast enough on the implementation of a quantum-resistant hashing algorithm,” Stillbigjosh, a former cybersecurity expert at Flutterwave, commented.
However, the founder of BlockTower, Ari Paul, pointed out that Bitcoin’s network faces a more immediate risk as attack costs have dropped significantly.
“Someone shorting 10%+ of BTC’s market cap then spending ~1/10th that to gain 51% control of hash power and mining empty blocks indefinitely, effectively turning off the network. Could fork the PoW algo, but just means the attack on the new network now costs <1/1000th the previous one,” Ari Paul noted.
The Risk of Conflict Between Bitcoin’s Decentralized Nature and Regulatory Oversight
Beyond technical challenges, some investors fear that government and institutional involvement will be Bitcoin’s biggest risk in the next 5-10 years.
“Government and institutional involvement changing the incentives of everything,” Investor Shinobi commented.
Bitcoin Holdings by Governments, Corporations, and Financial Institutions. Source: BitcoinTreasuries
Data from BitcoinTreasuries shows that over the past five years, Bitcoin holdings by private companies, public companies, governments, and ETFs have surged more than 12 times, from 210,000 BTC to over 2.6 million BTC. As a result, regulatory intervention could introduce legal pressures or unwanted changes to Bitcoin’s fundamental operations.
“The biggest structural risk is the friction between Bitcoin’s decentralized ethos and the increasing push for centralized regulatory oversight. In essence, as governments and large institutions tighten control and enforce compliance, the network might be forced to compromise on its core principle,” Investor MisterSpread warned.
The discussion sparked by Lyn Alden’s question suggests risks that could trigger black swan events for Bitcoin. It also reflects the growing awareness among industry leaders and investors about Bitcoin’s systemic risks in an era increasingly shaped by political stability and artificial intelligence.
