May 4, 2026

The Ethereum Foundation has sold another 10,000 ether (ETH) in an over-the-counter deal to Tom Lee’s BitMine (BMNR), continuing a string of treasury sales this year. In a post on X on Friday, the organization said it finalized the sale at an average price of $2,292.15 per token, implying proceeds of roughly $22.9 million. The counterparty was BitMine Immersion Technologies, a repeat buyer that has increasingly acted as a key institutional accumulator of ETH from the foundation. The latest transaction follows a similar March deal in which the foundation sold 5,000 ETH to BitMine at about $2,042 per ETH, raising roughly $10.2 million. Like prior sales, the Ethereum Foundation said proceeds will go toward core operations & activities, including protocol research and development, ecosystem growth and community grants, a longstanding funding model for the organization.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, is set to surge in the next four years, propelling its market capitalization to $16 trillion by 2030, Ark Invest said in its annual research report, Big Ideas. The more than 10-fold growth, market cap is currently about $1.5 trillion, will be driven by accelerated institutional adoption and crypto’s evolution into an asset class that features in investment portfolios worldwide, the Cathie Wood-led investment company said. That’s a compound annual rate of roughly 63%. Bitcoin’s increased popularity will help drive the broader digital asset market to around $28 trillion by the end of the decade, according to the report. It’s currently about $2.7 trillion. It also means the price could surge: Even if all 21 million BTC were in circulation by then, which they wouldn’t be, one bitcoin would be valued at more than $730,000. Wood has long been bullish on bitcoin. In January, Ark Invest forecast a price range of $300,000-$1.5 million by 2030. In February, Wood reiterated its appeal as a hedge against inflation and deflation, driven by technological acceleration.

OKX has introduced an open standard for agent-led transactions, rolling out its Agent Payments Protocol (APP) to support full-cycle business activity handled by AI systems. According to OKX, the newly launched protocol extends beyond simple transfers by enabling AI agents to manage commercial processes such as pricing, negotiation, escrow, settlement, and dispute handling. The exchange said that recent advances have pushed AI agents from basic responses into executing workflows and managing operations, where “the bottleneck shifted from intelligence to commerce,” adding that existing systems fail to support the full lifecycle of transactions. Supporting this system, OKX has integrated its self-custodial Agentic Wallet, which uses trusted execution environments and operates across more than 20 chains. The company said the wallet allows AI agents to hold and transfer funds independently while maintaining security controls. The company said APP has received backing from cloud and technology providers, including AWS and Alibaba Cloud, alongside crypto firms such as Nansen, Uniswap, Paxos, and QuickNode.