Bitcoin Tops $70,000 as Investors Await Potential Iran Ceasefire Deal

Bitcoin inched its way back toward $70,000 today as President Trump updated the nation on the Iran war — all while he was flanked by the calming presence of the Easter Bunny.

And while there are other headlines that matter to crypto — including big news at AAVE as the firm that has handled their risk management for years threw in the towel — it’s clear the market continues to swing on Iran headlines and the President’s self-imposed Tuesday evening deadline for a peace deal.

So why is Bitcoin higher? Well, for one reason, Michael Saylor and Strategy are back to buying. The largest crypto asset treasury company revealed it scooped up $330 million more in Bitcoin last week. That boosted Strategy’s total holdings to slightly more than $58 billion in BTC, which is currently held at about a $5 billion loss on paper.

Meanwhile, Tom Lee’s BitMine continues to follow the same playbook for Ethereum, scooping up another $150 million in ETH.

"Bitmine has maintained the increased pace of ETH buys in each of the past four weeks, as our base case ETH is in the final stages of the 'mini-crypto winter.' In the past week, we acquired 71,252 ETH which is the highest pace of buys since the week of December 22, 2025," Lee said in a statement.

All that said, it’s increasingly looking like two players continue to do the bulk of the work in their respective pools to sap up idle demand and buy time for the thesis to play out. Lee has increasingly been vocal about Ethereum outperforming the S&P since the war began — but you do wonder how well the asset would be holding up were BitMine not buying as much as it is right now.

Nonetheless, as Lee points out, “ETH remains the second best performing asset since the start of the war, with a 6.8% gain and outperforming the S&P 500 by 1,130bp. And ETH beating gold by 1,840bp demonstrates ETH is the wartime store of value.”

But the number one question facing investors now is reaching a tipping point: Is this war ending soon, or is it about to intensify?

President Donald Trump continued pushing for a ceasefire deal before a self-imposed Tuesday deadline, while simultaneously warning in an interview with Axios over the weekend, that if a deal doesn’t happen, “I’m blowing up everything over there.”

The President continued that threat while speaking to reporters in person from the White House on Monday. “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” he said, noting that negotiations are ongoing —calling them “a significant step.”

For now, traders seem content to straddle a bit above and below the $70,000 mark. As Galaxy’s Alex Thorn jokingly pointed out, there remains a large short wall around the $73,000 level that would need to fall to break into new ground.

DeFi Giant AAVE Faces Shakeup

It feels like the biggest project in DeFi, AAVE, has been dealing with battle after battle. Last year, the project’s public DAO got locked in a governance dispute (dubbed a “civil war” at the time) with the firm’s development arm, AAVE Labs (Avara) over how revenue should be distributed.

Now, one of the largest risk managers behind the platform is stepping away, with Chaos Labs making the public announcement today.

“This decision was not made in haste,” Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg wrote on X, noting that AAVE’s upgrade from its V3 to V4 requires a massive security undertaking. “Taking on something new responsibly requires new infrastructure, new tooling, new simulations, and the full operational burden of going from zero to one again on a codebase that has not yet been battle-tested. That is a materially larger scope than V3, and that expansion is core to our calculus.”

Goldberg outlined the seriousness of walking away from the $5 million his startup would have received, albeit at an operational loss.

“Aave likes comparing itself to banks, so let's use that benchmark. Banks allocate 6 to 10 percent of revenue to compliance and risk infrastructure,” he said. “In 2025, Aave generated $142 million in revenue. Our budget was $3 million, roughly 2% of protocol revenue.”

AAVE founder Stani Kulechov tried to assuage fears in a post of his own, noting that AAVE works with multiple risk managers and that it can sometimes lead to various contributors parting ways.

"While this model does create tension between risk managers from time to time, we believe it has been valuable in safeguarding Aave, he wrote on X. "What we did not support were other elements of the proposal, including setting Chaos Labs as the sole risk manager and using Chaos Labs price oracles instead of Chainlink on all new deployments, as well as adopting Chaos Labs vaults as the default vaults (which are not yet audited) for all B2B integrations."

The departure opens new questions about the status of AAVE as the most popular DeFi platform in crypto — and follows two other major contributors, ACI and BGD Labs, which also departed as Aave enters its next phase.

Polymarket Plans Stablecoin

Prediction market giant Polymarket is teasing an upgrade the company is calling its “biggest infrastructure change since launch,” and will include the launch of its own native USD stablecoin.

Polymarket USD will mark the company’s shift away from using USDC.e, a bridged version of USDC on Polygon. The company said its new stablecoin will be launched in partnership with Circle, as its backed 1:1 with their USDC dollar-pegged coin.

The latest update, which will see the company’s entire trading engine streamlined, is expected in the next month.

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