Solana staking protocol Fragmetric completes $7 million seed round

May 19: HSBC economists Janet Henry and Ben Ellis pointed out in a report that even if the U.S. and Iran strike a peace deal in the near term, more central banks will likely lift their policy rates. They explained that even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens rapidly, supply shock risks and their effects on global inflation and growth will continue. Current rate hikes are largely centered on maintaining central bank credibility. Australia’s and Norway’s central banks already faced inflation pressures before the conflict, and they’re hoping May’s rate hike will be their final one. The European Central Bank and Bank of England could start raising rates in June or July; if the Federal Reserve raises rates, more emerging market economies may tighten their monetary policies. HSBC forecasts the Philippines will raise rates further, and expects rate hikes in India and Indonesia by the second half of this year. (FXStreet)

A May 19 report states that Alibaba’s Qwen 3.7Max Preview and Qwen 3.7Plus Preview—its two new Q&A-focused large language models—are set to launch shortly. According to Arena’s evaluations, Qwen 3.7-Max-Preview ranks 13th globally in the text domain, making it the highest-ranked Chinese model in that category. In the visual domain, Qwen 3.7-Plus-Preview places 16th on Arena’s leaderboard, also securing the title of the top-ranked Chinese model for visual tasks on the list.

As of May 19th, even with ETH’s roughly 26% year-to-date price drop, Ethereum’s staking ratio has climbed from 29% at the start of the year to roughly 31%. This signals that long-term holders are brushing off price weakness and on-chain risks, steadily reducing the token’s circulating supply. Historical trends show that when supply is tightening, a meaningful rebound in demand tends to provide solid support for asset prices. Additionally, liquidity staking platforms like Lido have drastically lowered entry barriers, expanding staking participation beyond just professional validators to a much wider base of retail and institutional users. Analysts note that as spot ETF products become more established and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization activity on Ethereum expands, institutional demand for staked ETH could bring long-term structural inflows into the staking ecosystem. Despite ETH’s underwhelming price performance, Ethereum remains deeply entrenched as a core player in RWA settlem

On May 19th, Hyperinsight monitoring reports a major short position on Hyperliquid closed for profit, unwinding both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) short positions simultaneously. The BTC short position was closed at roughly 363.2 coins, valued at about $27.8 million, with a closing price of $76,774. The ETH short position totaled 2808 coins, worth approximately $5.98 million, closed at a price of $2,130—bringing the total value of closed positions to around $33.8 million. Immediately after closing, this same address placed new sell orders: planning to short 257.2 BTC (~$40 million) in the $77,500–$78,000 price range, plus 4,484 ETH at $2,230 (about $10 million). Address: 0x32008fcb6bbd16532afc83ca8b6c920dde22c407

May 19 – According to Onchainlens monitoring, a newly created address withdrew 41,847 SOL from OKX five hours ago, with the withdrawal valued at $3.55 million.

On May 19th, per monitoring from HyperInsight (https://t.me/HyperInsight), amid a broad weakening of the U.S. stock storage sector, a whale wallet (0xefd3a) on Hyperliquid opened massive short positions in Western Digital (SNDK) and Micron Technology (MU), locking in partial profits. The whale shorted 9,510 shares of SNDK (worth approximately $12.35 million) and 7,380 shares of MU (around $4.97 million) using 3x leverage on the platform, and has so far accumulated over $620,000 in unrealized gains.